Up to 70,000 federal contractors are being required to go to their local notary to get a special stamp on a letter to authenticate to the General Services Administration the vital details of their business, including who is the authorized “entity administrator associated with the DUNS number.”
These are the first details of the impact on vendors emerging from the latest case of fraud to affect GSA’s System for Award Management (SAM).
This would be the third such incident in the last five years in which a third party either stole or changed contractor data. GSA alerted vendors on March 22 after it found a third-party changed the financial information of “a limited number” of contractors registered on the governmentwide the SAM.gov portal.
GSA issued initial details of the fraud at that time and then updated the frequently asked questions on earlier in April.
Now, GSA is requiring notarized letters for several thousand contractors immediately, and then any vendor whose existing registrations on SAM.gov need to be updated after April 27.
However, is seems vendors are struggling with GSA’s notarization process. 56 percent of the 7,500 notarized letters received, have been rejected for various reasons.
GSA has reportedly added staff to its Federal Service Desk to support the response and continues to evaluate the overall impact of this fraud incident, including call volume and wait times.
By the end of June, GSA plans to end the requirement for a notarized letter “by implementing a data-driven, risk-based approach” by combining technical and analytic processes “to reduce risk and focus any additional burden only on those entities with the highest risk profile.”
Beyond the impact on contractors and GSA, the SAM.gov modernization effort also now will be delayed.
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