If you are a small business or veteran-owned business that hold a GSA Contract with the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), you will now need to verify your company’s ownership status in order to gain priority for the department’s set-aside contracts. On January 3rd, the VA announced that it is in the early stages of verifying that the businesses in the VetBiz database (www.vetbiz.gov) are in fact owned by veterans. Companies will now have to submit an application to substantiate their status to VA as owned and controlled by veterans, service-disabled veterans or eligible surviving spouses. If you are registered in the VetBiz database as veteran-owned, you should have received notice in early December 2010 that the verification process would begin in January. In response to this notification, contractors must provide documentation within three months of receiving the agency’s notice to keep their status. Instructions from the website state that, “Failure to complete the form will result in not being able to register your business as a verified Veteran-owned or service-disabled Veteran-owned small business.” Only companies that submit the information will be listed in the department’s VetBiz VIP database. Instructions for the verification process can be found here: http://www.va.gov/OSDBU/veteran/verification.asp.

If you’re a Government Contractor chances are you’ve heard a thing or two about the E-Verify Program. For many of our clients, this system is among one of the very first they are introduced to upon GSA Schedule contract award. Utilized by over 230,000 employers, the E-Verify Program is an online system operated by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Social Security Administration (SSA) dedicated to helping employers validate whether their employees are authorized to work in the United States. With the end goal of creating a more “reliable and legal workforce” the program has been criticized by many as unreliable due to its limitations in recognizing many forms of identity fraud. In fact, according to a recent study by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS), the system exhibited an inaccuracy rate of 54 percent for unauthorized workers – evidence that half the time the system was unable to detect identity theft. To combat these issues and strengthen the verification process, DHS has expanded the system’s photo screening tool which enables photos to be directly crossed checked against photos contained in government databases. According to USCIS, the photo tool has “vetted over 300,000 photos with employers and detected more than 1,000 instances of fraudulent immigration documents.” In November of last year, DHS announced it would further enhance the program’s capabilities by linking it to the State Department’s passport database, allowing the system to scan passport photos to determine if it matches the State Department’s records. In addition to exploring the use of biometrics and enhancing fraud-detection algorithms, the USCIS outlined several initiatives during the system’s program evaluation last year that would directly address identity fraud: Strengthening program monitoring and compliance by expanding the number of behaviors monitored for misuse and the amount of compliance assistance provided to employers and creating mechanisms for locking Social Security Numbers detected in possible identity fraud; Instituting a Data Analytics System to automate the analysis of E-Verify transaction data and serve as a force multiplier for program Monitoring and Compliance efforts; and Deploying a self-check function to allow citizens and noncitizens to check their E-Verify response before being hired, which could also allow individuals to lock and unlock their SSNs for E-Verify purposes.

While helping my clients with GSA Contractor Post Award and governement business development services, I’ve found that many have never heard of GSA’s MarkeTips Magazine before. I’d like to take a moment to highlight the magazine and show you how you can use it as a tool to advertise your products and services under a newly awarded GSA Schedule contract. What is MarkeTips?

Congress’ Small Business Jobs Act of 2010 includes an array of provisions aimed at helping small businesses gain access to capital, compete for government contracting opportunities, expand exporting opportunities and obtain other assistance to help them grow and create jobs. One of those provisions is The Small Business Teaming Pilot Program which provides grants to well-established national companies or organizations capable of training and guiding small business government contractors. This pilot program was developed in hopes of assisting undersized firms competing for large contracts. The Small Business Administration (SBA) is in charge of distributing the money and plans to award up to $5 million in grant funding as part of the program. In fiscal year 2011 the SBA can make 10 to 20 grant awards ranging from $250,000 to $500,000. The financial assistance, which can be in the form of a joint venture, or a prime and subcontractor relationship, is expected to focus on customer relations and outreach, team relations, performance measurement and quality assurance. Recipients of the grants are also charged with helping small business locate other firms to team with for larger government opportunities, identifying potential government contracts and preparing and submitting bids.

In this month’s blog, I wanted to start out the new year talking about the US Trade Agreements Act of 1979 (“TAA”). Yes, the TAA (19 U.S.C. § 2501 et seq) continues to be one of the main pain points of GSA and USG contractors and at the same time, one of the most confusing subjects to tackle. This is no more evident than in the latest DOJ lawsuit filed on November 24, 2010 against four GSA contractors. All four of these contractors have a Schedule 75 contract for Office Products / Supplies and the DOJ alleges they “offered for sale and actually sold products that did not comply with the TAA.” Here is a relevant introductory section from the filing: “5. Each of the defendants entered into a MAS contract with GSA for the sale of office supply products. At the time of contract award and on occasions thereafter, each defendant agreed that it would sell to the United States Government only end products that originated in designated countries, and that it would not sell end products that originated in non-designated countries such as China, India, and Malaysia. But in fact, over the course of their GSA MAS Schedule 75 Contracts, each of the defendants knowingly offered for sale to Federal agency customers through the federal supply schedule office supply products that originated in non-designated countries, and sold and submitted invoices for payment to Federal agencies for thousands of individual office products that originated in China and other non-designated countries. Each of these invoices for TAA non-compliant items were false claims to which defendants were not entitled to be paid. As a result of these actions by defendants, the United States paid false claims for millions of dollars of non-compliant products that it would not have paid had it known that the products originated in non-designated countries.”

Have you thought about how your company will function in the event of a terrorist attack or natural disaster? In a post-9/11 and Hurricane Katrina world, this is a must. FEMA recommends that every business have an Emergency Plan as well as a Continuity of Operations plan (COOP) in order to maintain essential business functions. FEMA's readiness website,ready.gov, focuses on creating such plans for personal and business purposes.