Last week’s announcement that the General Services Administration had updated its Dun & Bradstreet contract will allow agency acquisition personnel and contractors wider latitude to use the standardized company information for purposes beyond mere identification.
But some transparency advocates consider the step insufficient.
In a Sept. 29 blog post, Kevin Youel Page, deputy commissioner of GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service, announced changes in the proprietary system for business identifiers in its Integrated Award Environment tracking system that are a “huge step forward in the goal to make data more accessible and readily available across government.”
This new way to record contracts and grants using the Dun & Bradstreet system is in keeping, he said, with GSA’s role in helping agencies implement the open data and standardization requirements of the 2014 Digital Accountability and Transparency Act. The D&B data are proprietary, which means they cannot be downloaded by the public unless the company grants the user a license.
Keep reading this article at: http://www.govexec.com/management/2016/10/gsas-new-contract-dun-bradstreet-draws-mixed-reaction/132205
