3 insights from our webinar on fed contract data

SAM.gov, the federal government’s System for Award Management, tracks billions of dollars in contracts and subcontracts, the companies and organizations that receive them, and entities barred or suspended from doing business with the government.

But the system, which incorporates several retired databases on government procurement, can be daunting to use — even for journalists who have some familiarity with it.

That’s why last week The Journalist’s Resource convened a hands-on demo, which I moderated, with David Zvenyach. He’s a software developer, lawyer and product strategist who has held executive roles in three presidential administrations, including as Executive Director of 18F and Director of the Government Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Services.

Understanding how to access data in SAM.gov is the first step for any public interest journalist who wants to know how federal dollars flow to business interests in the U.S., both locally and nationally.

More than 150 of you attended, and Zvenyach answered many of your questions.

The full video below is well worth the hour. But if you don’t have time, read on for three quick takeaways.

1. Follow the codes

You’ll find several numerical codes when working with data from SAM.gov, but there are two in particular that will help you understand what the government is buying.

North American Industry Classification System codes — NAICS codes — identify the industry that a business selling something to the government is in. It’s a standardized system across federal government purchasing.

Look up individual NAICS codes via the Census Bureau.

Code 334511, for example, includes firms that make search, detection, navigation, guidance, aeronautical and nautical systems and instruments.

The other code type to know is product and service codes. Those are especially useful for understanding what the government is buying, Zvenyach said.

Find individual product and service codes in the product and service code manual, which includes specifics on the types of goods, services, research or development the government bought under that code.

Code 1410, for example, includes “complete drones, initially designed as missiles, but converted to drone use,” according to the manual.

2. Keep an eye out for errors in the data.

While data accessed from SAM.gov contains rich and specific information on government purchasing, there may be errors.

Which begs the question: Can the data really be trusted?

“I’m the sort of person that lives and eats and breathes this data every day,” Zvenyach said. “The short answer is kind of — but kind of not.”

During the webinar he showed a subcontract that was entered into SAM.gov as beginning in 2106. An unlikely start year, being 90 years in the future. The real year was probably intended to be 2016, Zvenyach noted. Errors don’t mean journalists shouldn’t use the data, but journalists — or anyone working with it — need to know that errors are lurking.

“That’s part of this process, is just knowing that the data is imperfect,” Zvenyach said. “It’s manually entered a lot of the time.”

See more examples of errors within SAM.gov on Zvyenyach’s Gov422 blog.

3. Use SAM.gov and USAspending in tandem.

SAM.gov is good for initially identifying contracts, while USAspending is good for digging deeper into those contracts, Zvenyach said. With USAspending, you can see outlays — which is how much the government has actually spent under a contract.

USAspending also allows for searching for contracts by geography and by various codes, including NAICS and product and service codes. You can find how much a company has received in government contracts over time, as well as recent executive compensation figures in certain cases. And there’s information on grant awards that government agencies have given.

“One of the questions that people ask is, how can you kind of get a sense of how much the government is spending, and which agencies, and who’s winning?” Zvenyach said. “USAspending is a really good source for that sort of aggregate information.”