The General Services Administration is looking to make its spending data more transparent, and that means renegotiating one of its top grants contracts.

The agency said in an Oct. 3 post that it had changed the terms of its Integrated Award Environment — an E-Government initiative to develop new ways to manage federal grant awarding — to provide a greater scope of federal spending.

The move is part the broader transparency standards of the DATA Act, which requires federal agencies to standardize their spending data by 2017.

The IAE contract specifically renegotiates GSA’s data reporting services provided by Dun & Bradstreet to use the data collection company’s proprietary information to more broadly report spending data.

"Previously, the data collected could only be used for a narrowly defined ‘acquisition purpose,’ greatly restricting the use of all D&B-related information," officials said in a GSA Interact blog post on Oct. 3.

"Our recently renegotiated contract changes that. Now, D&B information can be used for other activities, like compiling research of historical procurement information and conducting trend analysis."

Specifically, the contract now allows agencies to open up D&B data used on the IAE platform for broader use in business analysis.

The renegotiation also removes a requirement to extract D&B-sourced content from government systems if another provider takes up a support role and allows third parties to access the company’s data subsets to commercial re-use.

GSA, the Department of Defense and NASA also published a regulation on Sept. 30to remove proprietary references to the Data Universal Numbering System — D&B’s unique identifying system — in the Federal Acquisition Regulation and replaces it with an "unique entity identifier."

"These two actions lay the foundation for the next steps in analyzing alternatives to support the continued integrity of the federal procurement process, increase transparency and open competition," GSA officials said.

Federal agencies are required by the DATA Act to start reporting their standardized spending data by May 2017.

Share:
In Other News
Load More