Say Hello To SAM, The New Federal Awards Database

By NEIL GORDON

After delays and ballooning costs, Phase 1 of the General Services Administration’s (GSA) federal procurement and awards database, the System for Award Management (SAM), went live on Monday.

The new SAM database is being touted as an optimally streamlined data resource that will bring greater efficiency and result in significant cost savings. SAM will eventually consolidate nine online government databases into one system. Phase 1 includes the Central Contractor Registration (CCR), the Online Representations and Certifications Application (ORCA), and the Excluded Parties List System (EPLS). These stand-alone legacy systems will be shut down as they are added to SAM.

The public can search for information on contractors and grantees without having to log in or register for a SAM account, although registration is required if you want to save your searches. Information that was previously publicly available in the legacy systems will now be publicly accessible in SAM. Sadly, this means contractor past performance data will still be off-limits.

The SAM architecture was designed by IBM (with assistance by Northrop Grumman) under a $74.4 million contract awarded in early 2010, but the genesis of the project – the idea of an Integrated Acquisition Environment (IAE) – dates back to 2001. For the GSA, getting to this point has not been easy. A lack of funding, coupled with the dramatic rise in costs (from $96 million to $181 million), forced GSA to delay SAM’s Phase 1 roll-out and scale back its ambition for future phases. In March, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) warned the GSA to reevaluate SAM to determine whether it is still the most cost-effective IAE alternative.

We encourage you to poke around the SAM database. Let us know what you think. If you need help, the GSA has posted a 350-page user’s guide here.

Neil Gordon is an investigator for the Project On Government Oversight. Image from SAM tutorial video.

Follow @NEGordon

Comments

[Chad]

This sam.gov website and the service provide is worse than anything I have ever experienced. They should outsource it to India or China to make it work better. Sorry for that. It has been more than a month and sam.gov is bouncing me to the cage code office for validation. the funny thing is the cage code office doesn't have any account from sam.gov for our company. Sam is blaming cage and cage is blaming sam. Everyone i speak with says they will escalate my request to the tier 2 level with who i can speak with anyone. WTF!!! Bottom line is we missed our contract deadline to ship and no one can answer any questions except say they will move to tier 2. Poor, Poor Service!!!

[Avril]

I miss being able to do entity searches in CCR.GOV. I feel that the layout, speed and ease of clicking on and viewing records through the hyperlinks in the search results list was so much quicker and easier in CCR than what I have to do in SAM now.

There are far too many clicks, page loads and multiple screens to sort through and wait for. Please find a way to fix this and make it easy to use again. It takes far too much time now. Pleeeeeeaaaaaassssssseeeee try to fix this.

[Chuck H from RI]

We are currently pending two Orders from the government, but since we have SAM issues we cannot get them. Our issue is that we were in CCR and ORCA, but somehow we cannot be seen in SAM (even though I am an admin user and am associated with our entity.) SAM couldn't have happened at a worst time for us. It is noteworty to point out that all of our competition are able to be seen and are actively bidding while we sit idle. So much for supporting small businesses (SDVOSB).

[Patricia K]

Ditto on every complaint. I suffered a 3 hour hold for support and when we got to the first question that anyone needs to answer to register and the support person told me it was a technical problem that has not been revised. WHAT!!! I have checked again after 5 days and still not revised. I am one small business that is not able to register, get CAGE code. I could not be more disappointed with my governments choices here!

[Forced to use SAM to do job]

The system is a huge step backwards compared to the legacy systems it replaces. An enormous waste of money and a buggy piece of garbage. The system is buggy, crashes, slow, non-intuitive, and has poor fuctionality. Thanks GSA!

[Craig F]

I own a recently-launched small business, and am trying to register my entity on SAM. I literally have spent over 30 hours of my own time trying to create a new entity, and this site simply does not work. WHY, WHY did they take down CCR before SAM was ready? Now i can't register my entity, can't do ORCA, can't get a CAGE code, and I'm not sure if I will even be able to bid on the RFPs that I am responding to right now.

Whoever is responsible for the SAM contract should give the money back, and GSA should start over. This can't possibly be that hard.

[Tim]

About 10 years ago I was with a company that moved from CostPoint to Oracle Financials. On Transition day we turned CostPoint off and Oracle on. What a disaster. We were an IT company and should have known better.

GSA has done the same thing with SAM, and four days into it I still can't get any data out of it. On Monday (Day 1) it took almost an hour just to set up an account.

I feel for the companies that have to be inputing data into the CCR or ORCA. They will be way behind.

[Bill]

The government websites were already complicated enough. Did they spend this money to try and make it worse? I think they may have succeeded. Terrible experience the last two days.

[Sam Support]

SAM keeps Crashing!!! Why??

Is this GSA's next big spending blunder? GSA has spent over $50 million so far on "SAM" its budget was almost $200M, and the system is crashing....

Who cares about a conference for $800K when GSA is spending $200M on a project that should have cost a fraction of that.....