The General Services Administration’s (GSA) Federal Acquisition Service (FAS) is exploring rulemaking around the possibility of publicly posting certain contractor performance metrics to GSA eCommerce and digital platforms like GSA Advantage!.
According to GSA, the goal of the potential rule would be to improve contractor performance and increase competition, transparency, and customer satisfaction. Performance metrics would include delivery information – such as on-time delivery and cancellation rates – and topics relevant to successful order fulfillment – like data quality, contract compliance, and customer satisfaction ratings or reviews.
“Despite the number of vendor choices on GSA platforms, finding a vendor that meets a customer’s specific needs can sometimes be challenging,” GSA wrote in its Oct. 15 blog post. “As in any contractual relationship, once the customer finds a vendor, contract performance and adherence issues may arise that can result in low customer satisfaction.”
“GSA believes that increasing transparency around facets of contractor performance will empower customers while also informing and encouraging GSA contractors to adjust their processes to compete in the market successfully,” the agency said.
GSA said that FAS is assessing whether to have this information publicly displayed or only available to logged-in users.
According to the blog post, FAS anticipates that a draft rule will be issued for public comment in the second or third quarter of fiscal year 2025. The agency is currently collecting feedback until Nov. 22 that will inform the draft rule.
GSA is looking for more information from both customers and contractors on more than a dozen questions, including what performance metrics the rule should consider and if the rule should cover all contractors.
GSA also wants to know what effect sharing performance metrics would have on contractors and efficient processes for contractors to dispute the performance metrics they believe are inaccurate.
