If you’ve updated your SAM.gov registration recently, you may have seen a new ownership page. A final rule recently amended the Federal Acquisition Regulations to require all SAM registrants, if owned by another entity, to identify that entity by name, CAGE code, and type of ownership. This rule will provide government insight into 1) Federal spending patterns across corporations, 2) Traceability in tracking performance issues across corporations, 3) Contractor personnel outside the United States, and 4) Supply chain traceability and integrity efforts. As the final rule noted, “Increased transparency and accuracy of procurement data broaden the Government's ability to implement fraud detection technologies restricting opportunities for mitigating occurrences of fraud, waste, and abuse of taxpayer dollars.” Ownership is defined as a “Highest-level Owner” and “Immediate Owner”. Ownership is defined as an Entity having ownership or control. And an “Entity” is defined as an Individual, Partnership, Corporation, Joint Venturer, or an Agent. To help respond correctly to this new requirement, we’ve outlined the ownership definitions below.

Many GSA Schedule Holders and prospective government contractors believe that selling to the government is a simple task. Hold on there - selling to the US government, the largest buyer in the world, is no easy task. Organizations need to market toward the government through an extensive and developed strategy. This requires organizations to do their homework about Business to Government (B2G) marketing.

In a recent interview with the General Services Administration (GSA) Inspector General (IG), Brian Miller, several questions in regards to the subject of voluntary disclosures leading to suspension or debarment were asked.

Growing viruses and continuous cyber hacks have government agencies and corporations concerned about the safety of their IT assets. Most organizations fail to realize that simple steps taken toward protecting IT assets are essential and will save them tons of costs, and seize the possibility of an attempted hack.

ITSM – Service Desk Ticket System Field and Categorization Simplification As anyone who owns a home or has a garage knows, we tend to collect stuff over time that we no longer need (or maybe never really needed) and then keep those items stored in places where they are in the way, or where they just simply look out of place. Maybe those items are now keeping us from seeing or even getting to the useful stuff that we are actually looking for. Well, this might also be the same problem that some of you are experiencing with those seldom or never used fields and selections in your Service Desk or Help Desk online ticketing systems. IT specialists would identify these as categorization selections like “PDA”, “dongle”, and “floppy drive”, or selections of application systems that they probably retired three years ago. These applications may even have fields that that no one uses anymore because they are not sure what those fields were intended for.

In the IT world, challenges always exist, whether we can currently identify the challenge or not, one will always arise. Rest assured, when an IT challenge becomes apparent, there is also usually a solution in existence. Often enough it’s the problem solving techniques that reach the end of the challenge, and delineates the solution.