Government Contracting Blog

If you offer products under the Multiple Award Schedule (MAS) program, especially Commercially Available Off-the-Shelf (COTS) items, you have probably seen the term “market threshold” before. You may have even experienced the dreaded scenario of being told that your proposed pricing exceeds the market threshold and cannot be accepted. However, you might not understand exactly what the “market threshold” is. That isn’t your fault, as how GSA calculates the market threshold has been fairly opaque. GSA uses an algorithm to calculate the market threshold, which serves as a marker of the upper limit on pricing that GSA is likely to accept for a specific item, at least without justification.

In the near future, many GSA Schedule holders will need to add another acronym to their vocabulary of federal contracting terms, TDR. TDR, which stands for Transactional Data Reporting, started as a pilot program in 2016, and is finally rolling out to all Schedule holders. As of MAS Solicitation Refresh #28, TDR became mandatory for any Schedule holder with a TDR-eligible Special Item Number (SIN).

As a current or prospective federal contractor, you are likely already aware that the federal government is the largest volume purchaser of goods and services in the world. However, while the federal government procures large volumes of goods and services, not every purchase they make is itself large. Smaller purchases are often necessary to ensure regular operations, which helps explain why the government created less cumbersome ordering procedures for transactions under certain dollar thresholds.

At Winvale, we often consider the pricing section of a GSA Schedule offer the most important to focus on because a lot of time and effort needs to be put into making certain that a prospective GSA Schedule contractor is putting forward the best pricing package that they can offer to GSA while maintaining a healthy profit margin. We have been through many scenarios with contractors and come across a number of mistakes that are commonly made when crafting, or modifying, GSA Schedule pricing. I would like to take you through a list of common mistakes contractors make with their GSA Schedule pricing, so that you can avoid them when dealing with your own GSA Multiple Award Schedule or offer.

Keeping up to date with federal contracting news can be overwhelming for contract holders nowadays. Whether or not your company has personally been affected by cuts or contract terminations, there is an understandable sense of unease. While GSA’s Multiple Award Schedule (MAS) program is not going anywhere, GSA does plan to “rightsize” the MAS program, one of the largest impacts of which will be cancelling non-compliant Schedules, or allowing them to expire.

Take a moment to think about all the sensitive information the United States federal government has access to: tax returns, Social Security numbers, medical information. Handling this trove of data makes cybersecurity perhaps more important for the federal government than any other entity. Recognizing this, the federal government has created programs like CMMC and FedRAMP.