Why We Performed This Audit
This audit was included in our Fiscal Year 2024 Audit Plan. In prior audits of GSA’s pricing tools, we identified: (1) deficiencies in Transactional Data Reporting (TDR) data quality, including the use of inaccurate part numbers; and (2) limited effectiveness of the Price Point Plus Portal. If contracting officers do not have fully reliable and effective data to conduct price analysis, federal customer agencies risk overpaying for products and wasting taxpayer dollars.
Our audit objective was to determine if GSA’s systems and processes ensure transactional data submitted by the contractor and the contractor’s product catalog contains actual manufacturer part numbers in accordance with applicable regulations and GSA policies.
What We Found
Access to accurate and consistent manufacturer names and part numbers is imperative to: (1) maximize the price analysis capability of the GSA Federal Acquisition Service’s (FAS’s) pricing tools and (2) provide information FAS contracting personnel can use to make fair and reasonable price determinations.
However, we found inaccurate manufacturer names and part numbers for products in the GSA Advantage! catalog and TDR data, including multiple variations for the same product, as well as names and part numbers that did not match those from the manufacturer. We also found that FAS does not standardize part numbers for related product add-ons and base products with options that have a single manufacturer part number for multiple variations, which inhibits identification and comparability across Multiple Award Schedule contracts.
Absent reliable manufacturer name and part number data, FAS’s pricing tools cannot identify identical products and provide useful pricing information for contracting officers’ use in negotiations, potentially resulting in higher awarded pricing. As a result, federal customer agencies may overpay for products offered on Multiple Award Schedule contracts and waste taxpayer dollars.
What We Recommend
We recommend that the FAS Commissioner:
- Identify and correct existing manufacturer part number and name inconsistencies in TDR and GSA Advantage! catalog data for products to ensure that identical products use the same part numbers.
- Develop and implement processes that ensure accurate and consistent part numbers are established upon new contract award and modification approval, while continuing to improve TDR data match rates through the TDR Data Quality Dashboard.
- Improve the FAS Catalog Platform’s automated data quality checks to ensure that incorrect part numbers are flagged and corrected to minimize the need for FAS contracting personnel to perform manual market research.
- Provide FAS contracting personnel with tools, guidance, and resources that allow for efficient and effective manual market research.
- Ensure FAS industrial operations analysts verify the accuracy of TDR data, as required, and verify whether part numbers are consistent with manufacturer sources.
- Implement processes to ensure identical related product add-ons and base products with options that have a single manufacturer part number for multiple variations can be identified and compared.
The Acting FAS Commissioner agreed with Recommendation 4 and partially agreed with Recommendations 1, 2, 3, 5, and 6. FAS’s written comments are included in their entirety in Appendix C.
