GSA’s 2024 Policy Landscape

Sometimes when either starting out with your General Services Administration (GSA) Multiple Award Schedule (MAS), or even if you’re a seasoned contractor, some of the inner workings of GSA can come off as overly mysterious. There’s often some questions left unanswered. Other times, however, they make sure to keep us updated on what we need to know to foster a deeper understanding of the work they do for our contracts. Going into 2024 or just going into the federal contracting landscape in general, there is a lot to keep up with. So, in this blog, we’ll be covering the policy landscape for the next year and what you can expect to see, as well as what changes have been made recently to the world of GSA.

GSA Schedule Compliance Concerns

First and foremost, contractor compliance is critical to success in the federal contracting landscape. Following the Federal Supply Schedule's (FSS) terms and conditions word for word throughout your GSA Schedule contract's lifespan with make or break it in terms of success within the MAS program. This is not a new policy by any means, but GSA has identified some important compliance issues that contractors are running into.

Without keeping an eye out for potential instances of noncompliance, you may never know there is a problem until it’s too late, whether the one instance grows beyond a fixable size or if the one instance of noncompliance turns into a pattern, leaving a trail of problems behind it.

Some of the compliance issues that GSA has deemed most common include:

• Offering products that are not Trade Agreements Act or TAA compliant
• Wrongfully designated as "Made in America"
• Products delivered late
• Not authorized by the manufacturer in the Verified Products Portal (VPP )to be sold by the contractor
• Essentially the Same (ETS) as Ability One products
• Sold under Transactional Data Reporting (TDR) but contractor does not comply with TDR reporting requirements
• Not correctly reporting GSA contract sales and remitting the Industrial Funding Fee (IFF)

To mitigate some of these issues and reduce risks, GSA is developing automated tools allowing them to communicate compliance concerns to vendors more efficiently.

Make sure to keep on track with these actions above and don’t be afraid to ask for help and support from a consultant if you need it. If you don’t comply, your Contracting Officer may choose to take action in a variety of ways. They may issue a Letter of Concern, schedule you to meet with an Industrial Operations Analyst, require you to submit a corrective action plan, or in more extreme cases, even cancel your contract. 

The 4P Report

One of the tools utilized by GSA to analyze the proposed prices or proposed price changes for a contract includes the 4P Report. This tool takes in information from the GSA Advantage! pricing data, open market pricing sources for Commercial Off-the-shelf or COTS items, Transactional Data Reporting data (TDR), and Consumer Price Index (CPI).

A new pricing algorithm was released to aid the determination of fair and reasonable prices. The new algorithm incorporates an inflation adjustment component and ensures high-demand items receive enhanced price scrutiny. It has also added more guards against outlier pricing affecting the analysis.

Addition of an FCP Compliance Report

This new compliance report feature in the FAS Catalog Platform (FCP) is going to allow users to see at a glance how their prices match up to their competitors. With the competitiveness of their pricing so readily available, planning for Economic Price Adjustments (EPAs) will be greatly eased since you'll see the market maximums for yourself.

This report in the FCP catalog will enable quick updates, speeding up and simplifying the process for non-compliant items. With a click of a button, you'll be able to remove items that were marked as things like "excessively priced," "no market research found," "non-TAA," and more.

Cybersecurity Updates

FAR Interim Rule

To guard against potential cyber-attacks, the Federal Acquisition Security Council has released a new interim rule that implements supply chain risk information-sharing requirements as well as exclusion and removal orders.

Under this, executive agencies are prohibited from acts such as procuring or obtaining any covered article subject to a FASCA order, or any products or services produced or provided by a source subject to a FASCA order. They are also prohibited from extending or renewing a contract to procure or obtain, any covered article subject to a FASCA order, or any products or services produced or provided by a subject to a FASCA order.

The exclusion order is exactly what it sounds like, it excludes products and services from inclusion in a contract or task/delivery order. For governmentwide Indefinite Delivery, Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) vehicles, the basic contract will be required to remove all excluded products or services under the order. So, if an exclusion order is issued for a company, their products or services cannot be offered in any more contracts or else the contract may not be awarded.

GSA compares the removal order to a “rip & replace” order meaning the products or services, which had previously received an exclusion order, will need to be removed from the executive agency information systems.

In the pre-award phase, the offeror must comply by representing that they have conducted a reasonable inquiry and is not providing any covered article, or any products or services subject to an applicable FASCA order identified in the solicitation at FAR clause 52.204-30(b)(1).

For post-award contracts, it’s now the contractor's responsibility to check that there are no FASCA orders out on their products or services every three months. You can do this via SAM.gov by visiting the homepage and selecting “View FASCA Orders.” From here, you can download the current list of orders out to review for your products or services.

Cybersecurity Proposed FAR Cases

The Federal Register published two proposed cybersecurity  Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) rules to partially implement Executive Order 14028, “Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity.”

FAR Case 2021-017, Cyber Threat Reporting an Information Sharing proposes to amend the FAR to increase the sharing of information about cyber threats and incident information between the government and IT service providers.

FAR Case 2021-019 (Standardizing Cybersecurity Requirements for Unclassified Federal Information Systems)  proposes to amend the FAR to standardize cybersecurity contractual requirements across federal agencies for unclassified federal information systems.

Keeping up with Future GSA Schedule Updates

If you have any questions or would like more information, we release regular updates in our weekly blog recap email and monthly newsletter. If you need help managing your GSA Schedule throughout these changes and keeping up with all the tasks related to your contract, feel free to reach out to one of our expert consultants.