How to Use Subcontract Award Data
In addition to our comprehensive, live-updating database of federal prime contract award and spending, GovTribe does real time acquisition and integration of subcontract award data.
What is a Subcontract Award?
Subcontracts can be complicated, but here is a simple, high-level description for the uninitiated.
The outcome of every completed federal procurement process is a prime contract award of some kind. A prime contract is awarded to a company, and that company has a contractual relationship (with associated benefits, responsibilities, and liabilities) with the federal government.
Many prime contract awardees, though, have partners. Those partners often have a subcontract relationship with the prime awardee, and receive what the government refers to as a subcontract award. With a subcontract award, the subcontractor has a contractual relationship with the prime contractor, NOT with the federal government. As a result, the federal government has no direct insight into the revenue split between a prime contract awardee and their subs.
As happens from time to time, shenanigans occur (or are suspected) on a federal contract, the public and/or Congress demand more transparency and accountability, and legislation is passed to deliver it. In this case, Congress passed Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act (FFATA) of 2006 to provide the public with better insight into government spending. This included transparency about subcontract awards and distributions.
Since 2006, prime contract awardees have been require to report their subcontract awards on the FFATA Subaward Reporting System (FSRS), and the federal government has been required to make public those reports on USASpending.gov.
Transparency achieved, right? Sort of.
Limitations of Subcontract Award Data
There are important differences between the nature and quality of subcontract award data vs. prime contract award data. The driver of these differences is that the federal government is responsible for the timely reporting and accuracy of prime contract award data. However, subcontract awards are self-reported by prime contractors via FSRS. And there is no real oversight, enforcement, or quality control of the subcontract award reporting process. So the completeness, timeliness, and accuracy of subcontract award data depends entirely on how diligent the relevant individuals are from within the bureaucracy of the prime contractor companies.
For this reason, meaningful aggregate analysis of subcontract award data is not really possible.
Put more plainly, you can look at who the top subcontract awardees are in a specific market segment — say DHS awards in NAICS category group 5415 in FY2017 — but you could not be confident that the story told by the data was accurate. The vendors showing the most subcontract award dollars in that segment are really just the vendors who subcontract most often to those prime contractors who reliably report their DHS subcontract awards.
So what is the value of subcontract award data?
How GovTribe Uses Subcontract Award Data
Because of these limitations inherent in subcontract award data, GovTribe does not provide a way to search subcontract data in aggregate. However, there are two very useful ways in which subcontract data has been integrated into the site.
- Viewing a Vendor’s Primes and Subs
- Listing known subcontract awards for a specific prime contract award
For every Vendor page listed on GovTribe, if that company has ever reported a subcontract award to another company, or has even been the subject of a subcontract award report, we show a list of those partner companies. This includes both their subs and their primes.
And for every Federal Contract Award that has any reported subcontract awards (i.e. like this one), we include a table titled Sub Contractors in which we list the companies that have received subcontract awards, the number of sub-awards, and the total dollar value of those sub-awards.
These integrations of subcontract award data address the two most common questions we receive related to subcontract data.
- Who does a given company tend to partner with?
- Are there any (reported) subcontract awards for a specific contract award?
For more information on navigating subcontract award data on GovTribe, check out our help article on the topic. And if you have other questions on this topic, let us know at help@govtribe.com.
