The federal government is looking to find a way to avoid spending 19 Million a Year on Numbers Generating Software that used to Only Cost 1 Million per year.
The US Government is spending millions of dollars on a contract with Dun & Bradstreet, what they do is to run a database that assigns numbers to other contractors. The rising price of that program was documented last week, in a letter from the Government Accountability Office to Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb. The the findings were that the government is currently shelling out almost $20 million per year on the very same system that ten years ago cost about $1 million annually.
The government handles more than $1 trillion a year in contracts and grants and needs to assign a unique number to each one of them as to be able to track all the businesses and other entities it deals with. For more than 30 years, it has been using the services of Dun & Bradstreet. However as the government has begun requiring more information and details costs have skyrocketed. So the government, after years of watching those costs rise, is finally starting to consider an alternative, amid concern that Dun & Bradstreet’s domination of the numbering market has driven up costs. “GSA believes that Dun & Bradstreet effectively has a monopoly for government unique identifiers that has contributed to higher costs,” GAO wrote in its letter to Nelson. GSA, or the General Services Administration, manages the contract. And example of the growing information needs: One contractor database, according to the GAO, includes 625,000 entities each with its own registered number.
A spokeswoman for Dun & Bradstreet defended the company’s work stating that “the rising costs are tied to expanding scope and requirements as directed by the government over the past decade.” “D&B has been a critical team member in helping the government meet their mission objectives which includes entity management, transparency and accountability,” she said and went further to comment “there is no legal or other basis that would support any claim of monopoly in this situation. Our partnership with the General Services Administration (GSA) enables D&B to provide a vast array of data, software, and services in a cost-effective, flexible manner to meet evolving government-wide priorities. We always seek to be responsive to our customers’ unique requirements, consistent with our strong heritage, market-leading solutions and high standards of customer service.” The Dun & Bradstreet contract now is worth up to $154 million, for a three-year period with the option of five additional years. Government officials are currently trying to figure out how to bring costs back under reasonable control — namely by switching to a “government-owned numbering system.”
