The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) will be upgrading how its customers apply for and manage their federal contracting certifications. What do you need to know? SBA’s certification upgrade to the Certify.sba.gov portal will start sometime this fall. Initial certification applications will not be accepted during the upgrade period. The upgraded system is expected to […]
Category Archives: Federal Governement Contracting
Yesterday, Administrator Isabel Casillas Guzman, head of the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) and the voice in President Biden’s Cabinet for America’s more than 33 million small businesses, announced that the moratorium on the 8(a) Business Development Program’s Bona Fide Place of Business (BFPOB) requirement will be extended through Sept. 30, 2025, for small disadvantaged […]
On May 30, 2024, the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) Administrator issued a program update to firms participating in the Women-Owned Small Business Federal Contract Program (WOSB Program). The announcement provided SBA certified Woman-Owned Small Businesses (WOSB) and Economically Disadvantaged Women-Owned Small Businesses (EDWOSB) an additional year of eligibility to those firms whose three-year certification […]
On April 9, the DOT issued a new final rule for its Disadvantaged Business Enterprise workforce participation plan. The program, first signed into law by President Ronald Reagan in 1983, sets goals to award at least 10% of DOT-funded projects to companies owned by minorities, women and other socially and economically disadvantaged individuals. The federal program […]
In the course of my career working with federal contractors, I’ve seen it happen time and time again: a subcontractor violates an applicable prevailing wage statute (either the Davis-Bacon Act or the Service Contract Act) by failing to provide its employees with the required wages and/or fringe benefits. The Department of Labor gets involved, and […]
This is a good article. although it has a construction contractor focus, the principles can be applied to any industry. “But all this customer cares about is low price!” We hear this line daily as a defense of longheld beliefs that their darned customers just don’t care about value over price. Here’s a new belief […]
If you are a government contractor, odds are you have faced a situation where some aspect of the contract you were performing changed outside of your control, or you ran into something that neither you nor the government expected. As a result, your work requirements likely changed, and with that, your costs likely changed as […]
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is warning vendors who wish to participate in USDA food purchase programs of a possible phishing scheme using fraudulent email messages. The fake emails look like they are solicitations for bids sent by USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS), which manages USDA’s food purchase programs. The threat actors have been […]
The Office of Inspector General for the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) has become aware of a scam involving disguised or “spoofed” email addresses. Individuals claiming to be senior DOI officials have used such addresses to solicit fraudulent Requests for Quotations (RFQs). These are fake. The fraudsters seek RFQs for electronic equipment (Apple iPhones, […]
In 2019, the Department of Defense (DoD) announced the development of the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) Program, which was then implemented in 2020 as an interim rule. We blogged about that way back in 2020. This program was designed to give a certification to contractors based on the depth and effectiveness of their cybersecurity […]