Georgia Tech Procurement Assistance Center

GSA announces plans to consolidate MAS contracts and asks for industry feedback

By

The General Services Administration is conducting market research for its planned consolidation of the Multiple Award Schedule (MAS) Program.  Earlier this month, GSA publicly announced the new single solicitation format, including streamlined terms and conditions, and its intention to collect feedback from government contractors in the industry.  According to GSA, the consolidation is part of its two-year modernization process for the program that began in November of 2018.  The consolidated MAS solicitation is scheduled for release later this year.  And if you have concerns or suggestions for GSA on this significant consolidation, there is still time for your input.

On June 7, GSA publicized its plan to restructure the MAS Program by issuing a news release on GSA.gov and posting an RFI to FBO.gov.  GSA announced that it intends to streamline the federal acquisition process by consolidating its 24 MAS into a single schedule for products, services, and solutions. It hopes to complete the new consolidated schedule, which it calls “Phase One” of the project, during this fiscal year.

Continue reading at:  SmallGovCon Blog

An inside look at GSA’s federal marketplace strategy

By

In a Federal News Network podcast, Emily Murphy, administrator of the General Services Administration, shares her vision for the agency’s Federal Marketplace Strategy (FMS).

During the podcast, Murphy outlines the four cornerstone initiatives (4C’s) of FMS:

  • MAS Consolidation
  • Commercial Platforms
  • Catalog Management
  • Contract Writing System

Murphy also provides an update on customer agencies growing use of GSA’s procurement portfolio, including the MAS, IT GWACs and OASIS.

Finally, she gives us a preview of the Federal Acquisition Service Training Conference scheduled for April 14-16, 2020 in Atlanta, Georgia.  FAST 2020 is a national training conference for the federal acquisition workforce, industry partners and customer agencies.

Listen to the podcast at:  Federal News Network

GSA moves forward with plan to consolidate the federal supply schedule program

By

The General Services Administration (“GSA”) currently operates 24 Multiple Award Schedules (“MAS”), under which it awards largely pre-negotiated contracts on largely commercial-item terms for a dizzying array of products and services.  The current schedules are organized by industry or type of service, with individual schedules covering areas both broad (Schedule 70, IT procurement), narrow (Schedule 78, sports equipment, signs and trophies), and potentially duplicative (Schedule 71, furniture/Schedule 72, furnishings and floor coverings).  The GSA recently announced that it will abolish this fractured landscape.  Rather than maintain its current 24 MAS rubrics as separate entities, GSA announced it will consolidate all 24 into a single schedule.  Stephanie Shutt, the Director of GSA’s MAS Program Management Office, described this change as part of a “mass reform project” to “ensure MAS is easy, efficient, and modern.”  This announcement impacts all contractors with this type of schedule contract and will dramatically alter the process by which contractors apply for and government stakeholders purchase from GSA schedules.

Continue reading this article at: Arnold & Porter website

Mass changes coming to all GSA Schedule contracts; webinar to be held on April 10

By

The General Services Administration (GSA) is planning to “refresh” all GSA Multiple Award Schedule (MAS) solicitations and issue a mass modification to existing contracts in April.  The changes include:

  • Updating proposal instructions to require order status on GSA Advantage! Orders.
  • Updating proposal instructions related to Section 508 Standards and information.
  • Incorporating new Service Contract Act (SCA) Wage Determinations.
  • Updating AbilityOne “Essentially the Same” Proposal Instructions.
  • Incorporating minor updates from FAC 2019-01 (defining “recruitment fees” in relationship to Combating Trafficking in Persons rules), as applicable.

In addition, individual Schedules may be updated with additional clauses or provisions to make clarifications, administrative corrections, and other required changes.

GSA will issue a bilateral modification to apply the changes to existing MAS contracts.  Contractors will have 90 days to accept the mass modification.

Please see Draft Significant Changes document for more detailed information on the upcoming refresh.

Note: This is the final set of solicitation refreshes before GSA consolidates the 24 existing MAS solicitations into a single Schedule for products and services. To learn more about MAS Transformation, read GSA’s Nov. 27, 2018 press release.

Webinar Offered

Register now for GSA’s April 10, 2019 public webinar about upcoming changes to MAS solicitations. This webinar will be in a listen-only format with the ability for participants to ask questions via an online chat function.

●         Date: Wednesday April 10, 2019

●         Time:  1:00 pm – 2:00 pm Eastern Time

●         Registration Link

 

The devil’s in the details as GSA seeks to consolidate the Multiple Award Schedules

By

The General Services Administration (GSA) will use the coming year to determine what its recently announced consolidated schedule will look like, according to the official leading the effort.

GSA announced in November the consolidation of 24 multiple award schedules into a single contract vehicle that federal agencies can use to purchase a range of more than 10 million products and services. Each year, agencies purchase about $30 billion worth of products — ranging from office supplies to various IT services — through GSA’s 24 schedules.

“Over this year, we’ll start the consolidation of the MAS program,” said Stephanie Shutt, director of the MAS Program Management Office, speaking at a recent GSA industry day.

Shutt said an integrated project team consisting of MAS members and officials from various acquisition centers and portfolios is doing much of the early work. This team will help make crucial decisions that could shape the single schedule.

For example, Shutt said they are reviewing all existing terms and conditions and determining where overlap exists among special item numbers, which generally categorize the kinds of good and services available. One goal, she said, would be to get rid of redundant or duplicitous conditions.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.nextgov.com/it-modernization/2018/12/devils-details-gsa-seeks-consolidate-multiple-award-schedules/153638/

Industry applauds acquisition consolidation, warns of work to be done

By

Members of the private sector and industry-representing groups applauded the General Services Administration’s decision to consolidate the 24 multiple award schedules into a single acquisition vehicle, but cautioned that the agency would have to do much more than just consolidation to affect real change.

“Assuming all else stays the same, combining all of the [special item numbers] under one umbrella doesn’t necessarily alleviate the burden to negotiations and buyers,” said Julia Conti, contracts director at CGI Federal, at a Dec. 12 GSA industry day. “Making it easier is not necessarily keeping it on autopilot.”

According to Conti and other members of a panel at the event, the GSA is going to have to rework contracting language, examine a broader array of contracting vehicles and make efforts to reach out to both agencies and the workforce for the MAS consolidation to be truly effective.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.federaltimes.com/acquisition/2018/12/12/industry-applauds-acquisition-consolidation-warns-of-work-to-be-done/

GSA to consolidate 24 multiple award schedules into one

By

The General Services Administration will be simplifying its multiple award schedule offerings by taking the currently 24 schedules available for federal agencies to purchase products and services and consolidating them into one, the agency announced Nov. 27.

“Reforming our schedules will improve customer service, make it easier for small businesses to access the schedules program, reduce duplication for all our vendors, and allows GSA’s workforce to focus on delivering solutions,” said GSA Administrator Emily Murphy in a news release.

“This is an important step in addressing feedback we’ve received from our government and business partners.”

The transition into a consolidated schedule will take place over the course of two years and be comprised of two phases, according to GSA officials.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.federaltimes.com/acquisition/2018/11/27/gsa-to-consolidate-24-multiple-award-schedules-into-one/

Are you a GSA Schedule contractor? Expect changes next year in how you report sales and pay your IFF

By

The General Services Administration (GSA) has announced that Federal Supply Schedule contractors will be required to use a new system beginning in 2019 to report their sales and remit their Industrial Funding Fee (IFF).

The present 72A Reporting System will be replaced with a Sales Reporting Portal (SRP).  The goal of the transition to the SRP is to provide a single reporting system for all contractors to use for reporting sales and remitting IFF.

GSA’s overall IT modernization efforts include improving its IT enterprise by building and maintaining a more modern and secure architecture for its IT systems.

The transition to the SRP system not only supports GSA’s modernization effort, but it streamlines the overall process of reporting sales and remitting the IFF, making it more efficient for GSA and its industry partners alike.

The Federal Acquisition Service’s Sales Reporting Portal currently houses all the Transactional Data Repository (TDR) contracts as well as all new quarterly reporting MAS contractors as of July 2018. GSA wants to complete the transition by moving more than 14,000 current contracts into the FAS SRP to allow for the sun-setting of the existing 72A reporting system.

GSA has developed and implemented a three-phase implementation approach that will be carried out over the next 12 months. This phased-in approach will let contractors start reporting in the new system while GSA transitions their historical data over from the legacy 72A system.

  • In Phase One, companies will be notified via email that their Schedule contract(s) have been assigned a FAS Sales Reporting Portal transition date. This date will be the first day of a reporting quarter.  No action will be needed until the end of that reporting period, when the contractor will begin reporting sales and remitting their IFF in the new FAS SRP.

Example: A contract is assigned the Jan. 1, 2019 transition date which is the first day of a reporting quarter.  No action will be necessary until the contractor has to report sales for that quarter in April 2019. That will be the first time the contractor would be required to log into the FAS SRP and report sales there.

  • In Phase Two, contractors complete their final reporting of sales and remittal of IFF in the legacy 72A System for the current quarter.

Example: FAS SRP Report Date: January 2019 – The contractor will report sales and remit their IFF in the legacy 72A system one final time for the period covering October 2018 thru December 2018.  This reporting will be due by January 30, 2019.  The company will report sales for the quarter January 2019 through March 2019 in the new FAS SRP during April 2019.

  • In Phase Three, all contract history will transfer over from the legacy 72A System into the new FAS SRP. This process will not happen until the last sales have been reported and the IFF is paid in the 72A System. Once complete, GSA will migrate the contract sales history over into the FAS SRP . If the contract has an overall variance (i.e., an imbalance between IFF owed and IFF paid) at that time, the contractor will be notified via email prior to migrating their history into the FAS SRP.

Contractors may direct questions related to this transition via email to: MASPMO@gsa.gov.

Contractor forfeits $1.7 million in assets, pleads guilty to delivery of cheap versions of products

By

Jim A. Meron, owner of California-based WOW Imaging Products LLC and Time Enterprises LLC, has pled guilty to wire fraud related to a procurement fraud scheme involving the General Service Administration (GSA) Federal Supply Schedule program and a Department of Defense (DoD) electronic ordering system.

According to court documents, between May 2011 and July 2017, Meron used his two office supply businesses to defraud federal government agencies out of as much as $3.5 million — involving thousands of transactions — by substituting and delivering cheaper, generic versions of expensive, name-brand products his customers ordered, and pocketing the price difference. As part of his plea, Meron agreed to forfeit more than $1.7 million in assets seized during the investigation of his crimes.

Meron’s companies contracted to sell office supplies to federal agencies through two web-based government sales portals, GSA Advantage and DoD eMall.  After Meron received payments for the premium products his customers ordered, he obtained compatible products from his suppliers that cost him a fraction of what his customer paid for the brand-name products they ordered.  Meron then substituted and delivered those cheaper products for the more expensive products his customers ordered, and retained the difference in cost.  Over time, Meron extended his substitution scheme to nearly all orders for those name-brand products, and never intended to deliver what his customers ordered.

This case is the product of an investigation by GSA’s Office of Inspector General and the Defense Criminal Investigative Service.

Meron is scheduled to be sentenced on February 4, 2019.  Meron faces a maximum statutory penalty of 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine on each count of conviction. The actual sentence, however, will be determined at the discretion of the court after consideration of any applicable statutory factors and the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, which take into account a number of variables.

Source: https://www.justice.gov/usao-edca/pr/granite-bay-man-pleads-guilty-multi-million-dollar-product-substitution-fraud-federal

How to leverage the government’s focus on transformation

By

Vendors with truly transformational technologies may soon find more receptive ears in the public sector, as senior IT executives wrestle with topics from acquisition reform to creating an environment that will attract the workforce of tomorrow into today’s government.

In late August, a number of public and private sector officials met in DC for a series of brief conversations on government IT and procurement, focusing on transformation. These conversations considered how to use innovation for everything from protecting critical assets to reforming acquisition methods.

Three key conversations dealt with how to consolidate procurement schedules, collaboration for technology modernization, and making government more attractive to younger prospective employees.

Keep reading this article at: https://washingtontechnology.com/articles/2018/09/14/insights-shaker-government-transformation.aspx

Contracting News

Read More

Contracting Tips

Read More

GTPAC News

Read More

Georgia Tech News

Read More