On June 23rd, 2016 the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) published a final General Services Acquisition Regulation (GSAR) rule to capture transactional data on procurements across all of its Federal Supply Schedules (FSS) contracts or Multiple Award Schedule (MAS) contracts, and Governmentwide Indefinite-Delivery, Indefinite-Quantity (IDIQ) contracts, including Governmentwide Acquisition Contracts (GWACs). The Transactional Data Reporting (TDR) Rule requires vendors to electronically report the price the federal government paid for an item or service purchased through GSA acquisition vehicles. The rule supports the governmentwide category management initiatives by producing market intelligence that GSA and its partner agencies can use to make smarter acquisition decisions and save even more taxpayer dollars.
The GSA Federal Acquisition Service (FAS) has also published a public notice (Notice-FAS-2016-01) to solicit comments regarding the public release of transactional data reported in accordance with the General Services Administration Acquisition Regulation (GSAR) Transactional Data Reporting clauses. GSA FAS will consider comments received in establishing its final position on which TDR data elements are releasable under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which will eventually be released to the general public via a public data extract. The comment period closes August 29, 2016.
As part of the strategic implementation of the rule across all GSA contracts, the agency will introduce the transactional data reporting requirement with a pilot of select products and services in the MAS program. This pilot will be introduced in a phased approach beginning in August 2016.
Why is FAS implementing this change? The goals of TDR are to:
- Significantly reduce burden to industry partners by eliminating the Commercial Sales Practices (CSP) and Price Reduction Clause (PRC) tracking requirements from Schedule contracts participating in the TDR pilot.
- Reduce contract administration burden for TDR pilot vendors once TDR is implemented.
- Provide business intelligence to strengthen “best value” decision-making by ordering activities, which will allow customers to take full advantage of the wide variety and complexity of products and services offered by Schedule Partners and pass on savings to the taxpayer.
- Improve competition and increase transparency
- Support category management and promote smarter buying
Summary of Planned Changes
The Schedules listed below make up the TDR Pilot and will be rolled out in phases as shown. Each Schedule refresh and mass modification will be preceded by an advanced notice posting on Interact, approximately 30 days prior to the refresh and mass modification release date:
| Schedule | Description | SINs | Offerings | Tentative Refresh/Mass Modification Release date |
| 72 | Furnishings & Floor Coverings | All | Products and Ancillary Services | August 2016 |
| 58 I | Professional Audio/Video | All | Products and Ancillary Services | August 2016 |
| 51V | Hardware Superstore | All | Products and Ancillary Services | September 2016 |
| 03 FAC | Facilities Management and Maintenance | All | Services and Ancillary Products | September 2016 |
| 75 | Office Products/Supplies | All | Products | October 2016 |
| 73 | Food Service, Hospitality, Cleaning Equipment and Supplies, Chemicals and Services | All | Products and Ancillary Services | November 2016 |
| 70 | IT Equipment, Software & Services | 132-8
132-32 132-33 132-34 132-54 132-55 |
Products & Services | November 2016 |
| 00CORP | Professional Engineering Services | 871-1
871-2 871-3 871-4 871-5 871-6 871-7 |
Services | January 2017 |
Upon acceptance of the bilateral Mass Modification, the requirement for providing CSP to accompany modification requests will be eliminated. In addition, vendors will no longer be required to track price reductions granted to their Basis of Award (BOA) customer or category of customers. Other clauses and provisions are also being updated to implement TDR. This will result in significant burden reduction for our industry partners as outlined in the TDRFederal Register notice.
Vendors are strongly encouraged to accept the bilateral mass modification in a timely fashion in order to minimize future burden in submitting modification requests and make administration of FSS contracts easier.
In order to ease the transition from the current 72A reporting database to the TDR reporting module, the requirement for commencement of reporting will not begin the date the modification is signed; rather, reporting will begin at the beginning of the next full business quarter as shown below:
| Mod Accepted: | Requirements Effective: |
| July 1st – September 30th | October 1st |
| October 1st – December 31st | January 1st |
| January 1st – March 31st | April 1st |
| April 1st – June 30th | July 1st |
GSA FAS will host 2 identical public webinars to provide interested parties an opportunity to learn about the planned changes and ask related questions. Webinar will be in a listen-only format with the ability for participants to type questions via an online chat function at the end of the presentation. Webinar information is provided below:
Session 1:
- Date: Tuesday, August 2, 2016
- Time: 10am-12pm EST
- Web Meeting Registration Link: https://meet.gsa.gov/tdr072016/event/event_info.html
Session 2:
- Date: Wednesday, August 17, 2016
- Time: 1-3pm EST
- Web Meeting Registration Link: https://meet.gsa.gov/e7d59jcyeut/event/event_info.html
For more inforamtion please go to: https://interact.gsa.gov/document/important-update-gsa-launch-transactional-data-reporting-tdr-pilot-refreshed-solicitations