Simplix president George Chisa will be meeting with the Director of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, Deidre Lee, on Monday August 9, 1999. This is your chance to get your comments to the very top of the procurement policy area in the federal government.

Mr. Chisa intends to address the following problems with the current trends in federal procurement:

• All procurements should be made publicly available and a public electronic posting of the award information should be mandatory for all purchases over $2500.00.
• Agencies should not be able to group unrelated items on to a single contract as that eliminates the ability of Small Business to compete for these items. Task orders should be publicly posted to ensure that this does not occur.
• Vendors need to have complete access to all opportunities, to be able to submit bids in a standard electronic manner, receive electronic purchase orders invoice electronically, and receive remittance information via a single consistent channel.
• All government electronic systems must interface to Central Contractor Registration and not require vendors to re-register or provide business information via an alternative process.
• Electronic Payment by credit card does not eliminate the need to post publicly all available opportunities. If payment is to be made via a credit card it must be stated in the Request for quote.

Simplix wants to make sure that problems in the federal procurement system are brought to the attention of those in a position to affect a change. If there is a topic that you feel should be raised, and it is not listed above, please contact George Chisa at gc+OFPP-Meeting@simplix.com.

The ECPN has been upgraded but several problems have been encountered, including rejected bids, corrupted data, and CCR registrations not being properly loaded. The government is aware of the problems and has been working on correcting them since Monday.

Simplix has been resending all the corrected transactions as they become available. Sorry for the confusion and incovenience; we are doing everything we can to assist the ECPN in this matter in order to ensure the swift, accurate delivery of transactions to our clients.