Storehouse of procurement numbers could aid Data Act implementation

Procurement data accumulated as part of federal agencies' online reverse auctions could boost the transparency of federal spending called for by the Data Act, according to a top executive at auction platform provider FedBid.

The measure, expected to be signed into law by President Barack Obama in the coming days, will require the government to publish spending and financial information according to common data standards. Once implemented, all federal agencies would have to report spending on grants, contracts and loans in machine readable form via USASpending.gov or a successor website.

That process, said Joe Jordan, president of FedBid's public sector and a former administrator at the Office of Management and Budget's Office of Federal Procurement Policy, will be daunting.

The challenge will be how agencies can access the myriad data sets across government to get meaningful, readable information. "There's no disaggregated information," he said, meaning things like granular pricing data for goods and services are not broken out uniformly.

FedBid, said Jordan, has helped foster the government's embrace of a more open procurement data environment and the company could provide a starting point as agencies move forward on Data Act implementation. "The Data Act requires sharing standardized data and common contracts," he said. "Our system is already there," breaking out details on contracts, prices, small business participation and other metrics.

The company, he noted, has helped the federal government with other targeted procurement data projects in the past. It supplied the pricing data that went into the development of RFP-EZ, an acquisition tool developed by the Small Business Administration and the Presidential Innovation Fellows program aimed at widening federal procurement avenues for small businesses.

Additionally, said Jordan, the company tracks a variety of data for federal agencies through the reverse auctions it conducts. The company co-owns -- with federal agencies -- the pricing and spending data amassed in those auctions.

Agencies have access to all of that data, he said, which can include detailed pricing information. Granular pricing data "is huge" for agencies because it's not all that common for agencies to have internally, he said.