The General Services Administration’s (GSA) Federal Acquisition Service (FAS) lacks effective processes to ensure accurate product data feeds its pricing systems, limiting contracting officers’ ability to compare prices, according to a new inspector general audit.
The GSA Office of Inspector General (OIG) said in an Aug. 13 report that inaccurate manufacturer names and part numbers in GSA Advantage! catalogs and Transactional Data Reporting (TDR) data prevent FAS pricing tools from reliably identifying identical products.
“Absent reliable product data, effective price analysis is not possible,” the OIG said. “This could result in federal customer agencies overpaying for products offered on MAS contracts and wasting taxpayer dollars.”
In a sample of 52 unique part numbers, GSA’s legacy Price Point Plus Portal (4P tool) returned pricing from all available sources for only 12 products, or 23%. The tool returned no pricing results for nine products and no TDR pricing for 31 products.
The watchdog found similar – and in some cases worse – results when it later ran the same sample through FAS’s newer Compliance and Pricing Reporting Portal (CPRP), which replaced the 4P tool on Oct. 1, 2025.
CPRP returned pricing from all available sources for 11 of the 52 products (21%) and no pricing results for 18 products (35%). It returned no TDR pricing for 36 products (69%). The OIG acknowledged timing differences between the tests but said CPRP’s results “are not encouraging.”
Manufacturer part numbers are a key input because FAS pricing tools use them to locate prices for identical products across government and commercial marketplaces. The audit found multiple variations of manufacturer names and part numbers for the same products, including entries that did not match manufacturer-assigned identifiers.
The inconsistencies affected pricing results. For example, for one sampled Igloo cooler, auditors found that incomplete matches caused the 4P tool to overstate the catalog median price by 5.3%. The tool also returned no TDR pricing for the product, which the OIG said “is especially concerning because we selected this part number directly from TDR data.”
The OIG also found weaknesses in FAS controls designed to improve data quality. Of 20 contractor assessment reports reviewed, industrial operations analysts did not verify manufacturer part numbers in 12, or 60%, of them.
The watchdog issued six recommendations, including calls for FAS to correct existing manufacturer name and part number inconsistencies, strengthen automated data-quality checks, improve tools for manual market research, and develop processes that allow configurable products to be identified and compared across contracts.
FAS agreed with the recommendation to provide FAS contracting personnel with tools and guidance to improve manual market research and partially agreed with the other five. The acting FAS commissioner argued that the report did not adequately quantify the impact of the inconsistencies and that the 2024 data examined by auditors does not reflect FAS’s current data environment.
Notably, GSA announced the full implementation of TDR in January of this year.