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The General Services Administration (GSA) amended the General Services Administration Acquisition Regulation (GSAR) to include clauses that require vendors to report transactional data from orders placed against certain Federal Supply Schedule (FSS) contracts, Governmentwide Acquisition Contracts (GWACs), and Governmentwide Indefinite-Delivery, Indefinite-Quantity (IDIQ) contracts.

Transactional data refers to the information generated when the Government purchases goods or services from a vendor. It includes specific details such as descriptions, part numbers, quantities, and prices paid for the items purchased. GSA has experimented with collecting transactional data through some of its contracts and found it instrumental for improving competition, lowering pricing, and increasing transparency. Accordingly, GSA will now test these principles on a broader base of its contracting programs. This move supports the Government’s shift towards category management by allowing it to centrally analyze what it buys and how much it pays, and thereby identify the most efficient solutions, channels, and sources to meet its mission critical needs.

GSA will introduce a new Transactional Data Reporting clause to its FSS contracts in phases, beginning with a pilot for select Schedules and Special Item Numbers. Participating vendors will no longer be subject to the existing requirements for Commercial Sales Practices (CSP) disclosures and Price Reductions clause (PRC) basis of award monitoring, resulting in a substantial burden reduction. Stakeholders have identified the CSP and PRC requirements as some of the most burdensome under the Schedules program. These actions represent the most significant change to the Schedules program in the past two decades. GSA has also created a Transactional Data Reporting clause for all new GWACs and Governmentwide IDIQ contracts and may apply the clause to any existing contracts in this class that do not contain other transactional data requirements.

In all, the Transactional Data Reporting rule will result in an estimated burden reduction of $29 million a year, which consists of a projected $15 million a year compliance burden minus the estimated $44 million a year burden for the CSP and PRC requirements being waived for vendors participating in the FSS pilot.