Use schedules funding fee surplus for other uses, petitions GSA

Fees collected from the General Services Administration schedules program could fund new programs and offset losses elsewhere if the Industrial Funding Fee were opened up for broader uses, says the General Services Administration. 

The IFF, currently set at 0.75 percent of a schedule sales transaction and paid by the private-sector, is meant to recover costs for the contracting program. 

In a Dec. 28 notice in the Federal Register, GSA says it wants to amend the General Services Administration Acquisition Regulation so it can use IFF funds to cover Federal Acquisition Service program losses and pay for new services that benefit existing FAS programs. 

If GSA is able to extend the fee to cover other activities, according to the notice, it would have to notify customers that it intends to use money for additional programs. 

Under the GSA Modernization Act of 2006, the agency says it gained the ability to use the net operating revenue it makes from the IFF for more than recoupment of schedules program costs.  However, it is unclear how much the additional revenue the agency still has to use for other services or how long extra spending could be maintained at the current fee rate. 

A February 2012 GSA office of inspector general report (.pdf) says that from fiscal 2007 through the projected fiscal 2012 numbers, GSA has roughly $235 million in surplus revenue, but it notes that MAS program costs are rising faster than its revenues.  The agency went from making $16.1 million in additional revenue in fiscal 2011 to a projected loss of $14.1 million in fiscal 2012. 

The changes are part of the GSA Acquisition Manual rewrite project, under which the agency says all parts of the regulation are under review. 

For more:
- see the notice in the Federal Register
- download the OIG report (.pdf)

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