After 9 years of the TDR pilot, only 2 percent of FY 2025 reported services sales data are usable, report says. Image: JHVEPhoto/Shutterstock.com
By: FEDweek StaffThe GSA is set to make mandatory a system for collecting data on contracts under the multiple awards system even though a pilot program started in 2016—and then extended and expanded several times—“failed” to achieve its goals, an inspector general report has said.
GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service recently announced that “transactional data reporting” will be mandatory starting October 1 across the entire Multiple Award Schedule program “despite persistent data quality issues, lack of data usage for pricing decisions, lack of price competition, and failure to support the OneGov Strategy . . . FAS has never effectively implemented TDR and has never made it functional,” says a report.
Expanding it “could place government agencies at risk of overpaying for products and services when ordering from FAS’s MAS contracts,” the report says.
Under that program, contractors are required to report transactional data, including prices paid by government customers, for products and services sold under their respective contracts; in exchange for that data, contractors are not required to disclose commercial pricing or adhere to price reduction requirements.
The IG noted that in 2023 it reported that the data collected through the TDR pilot program to that point “was never used to negotiate contract-level pricing. Instead, GSA amassed a collection of data that is almost entirely inaccurate, unreliable, and unusable.” The GSA in 2024 expanded the program to include additional product special item numbers despite those findings and even though its own data quality dashboard identified only 35 percent of TDR data received that fiscal year as usable, it said.
“We are particularly concerned with GSA’s expansion of TDR to services without having a tested methodology to ensure data is accurate and usable. Services make up approximately 60 percent of MAS program sales. Currently, after 9 years of the TDR pilot, only 2 percent of FY 2025 reported services sales data are usable,” the IG said.
Because the report was a management alert, it did not include a response from GSA.
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