By: Lindsay Simmons
Last month the General Services Administration (GSA) awarded a $41 million, five-year contract to Ernst and Young LLP (EY) to replace Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) as the contractor supplying entity validation services – the well-known, long-standing Data Universal Number System (DUNS). All federal agencies and federal contractors (and grant recipients) – everyone doing any kind of business with the federal government – will be subject to and effected by this change from a DUNS number to a non-proprietary unique identity identifier.
As our readers know, every entity receiving federal contracts or grants must be registered in System for Award Management (SAM) (the website at SAM.gov). Until now, the SAM system used DUNS numbers as the public-facing unique identification number. In other words, DUNS was the mechanism for protecting registrants’ tax identification numbers (or other sensitive identifiers).
The transition from DUNS to the new EY system means that the DUNS numbering system will be abandoned in favor of a new government-owned SAM Managed Identifier (SAMMI). SAMMI will be used to identify all entities within SAM.gov. GSA hopes to make this transition by next year. The key here is the transition from a contractor-owned system to a government-owned system, hence the use of the name “SAMMI” which is linked, in contractors’ minds, with SAM.gov.
Will this transition be difficult to achieve, particularly on the short turn-around timetable planned by GSA? According to GSA “yes’, which is why it intends to publish specific transition plans shortly – plans that will be shared with all entities using SAM.gov. It would also be prudent to follow the progress of this transition at https://interact.gsa.gov/.
Lindsay Simmons is responsible for the contents of this article
© Jackson Kelly PLLC 2019.