by Dave Alexander, Lincoln Strategies, LLC
Under GSA’s Professional Services Schedule, why do some contracts include Special Item Numbers (SINs) with “C” prefixes, while others exclusively have SINs without “C” prefixes?
In looking at GSA eLibrary recently, you might have noticed that some GSA contracts feature SINs both with and without a “C” prefix, and others do not.
For example, let’s say that you are looking at two different firms, each of which performs environmental consulting services. You might see that the first firm’s listing in GSA eLibrary includes SINs 899-1 and C899-1, but the second firm’s listing shows SIN 899-1 only.
Why the different treatment?
Well, it has to do with GSA’s recent transition to the Professional Services Schedule. When this Schedule was activated on October 2, 2015, it absorbed in their entirety eight former stand-alone Schedules. Seven of those Schedules included the following:
- Mission Oriented Business Improvement Services (MOBIS)
- Professional Engineering Services
- Environmental Services
- Language Services
- Logistics Worldwide (LOGWORLD)
- Financial and Business Services (FABS)
- Advertising and Integrated Marketing Services (AIMS)
For any firm that held a contract under one or more of the above GSA Schedules, on October 1 that firm was migrated to a single contract under the Professional Services Schedule. The single Professional Services Schedule contract holds all of the SINs that the firm used to hold in its contract(s) under one or more of the above-listed stand-alone Schedules.
So, for example, let’s say that a firm used to hold contracts under the first three Schedules listed above, and the SIN numbers included 874-1, 871-2, and 899-7. The firm would now hold one Professional Services Schedule contract, with the same SIN numbers. None of the SINs would have a “C” prefix under the Professional Services Schedule.
Under their Professional Services Schedule contracts, however, some firms do have SINs that contain “C” prefixes. Why?
Prior to October 2015, these firms had a “Consolidated” Schedule contract. This is the eighth contract that was absorbed by the Professional Services Schedule. Under a Consolidated Schedule contract, a firm always was awarded two versions of each SIN: one with a “C” prefix, and one without.
For example, consider a firm that was awarded a Consolidated Schedule contract for environmental consulting services in, say, 2014. When awarded, that firm’s contract would have included SINs C899-1 and 899-1. When the transition to the Professional Services Schedule took place on October 2015, the basic rule applied: every SIN that used to be in the stand-alone Schedules survived the transition to the new contract under the Professional Services Schedule. If the firm used to have SINs C899-1 and 899-1 under its “old” contract (under the Consolidated Schedule), it will continue to have both of these SINs under the Professional Services Schedule.
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There are a few more potentially confusing aspects of the “C” and “non-C” issue. Every GSA Schedule has an alphanumeric number, at the Schedule level. The new “Professional Services Schedule” has the same alphanumeric number that had been assigned to the “Consolidated” Schedule—namely, FCO00CORP0000C, commonly referred to as 00CORP for short.
In all essential respects, when GSA set up the Professional Services Schedule, it did so by making a few changes to Schedule 00CORP, and issuing it as an update—in GSA parlance, a “Refresh” of 00CORP. The name changed (i.e., it became the Professional Services Schedule, not the Consolidated Schedule), and there were a few substantive changes; e.g., a few SINs that had been included when it was called by the former name are no longer in the newly updated version; and other SINs are “shared.” (These types of changes are not the subject of this article.)
GSA’s ultimate goal is to remove the “C” prefixes from all SINs. But for now, if a firm had a “C” prefixed SIN under the Consolidated Schedule prior to October 1, 2015, it will retain both that version of the SIN plus a version without the “C.” This is in part due to complexities associated with systems such as GSA eBuy. In addition, there are still active, multi-year Task Orders and Blanket Purchase Agreements (BPAs) that had been issued prior to October 1, 2015 that had been issued under SINs with “C” prefixes. The path of least resistance was to allow those assignments to continue under the originally issued, “C”-prefixed SIN numbers.
GSA has issued guidance to all potential users of the Professional Services Schedule, stating that all new task orders (and BPAs) should be issued under the non-“C” versions of SINs.
This is a potentially confusing area, and while this article is accurate as of today (mid-November 2015), it GSA will almost certainly adjust its procedures under the new Professional Services Schedule, some of which might affect the use of the “C” prefix. Feel free to contact the author of this article for further information or guidance.
The author of this article, Dave Alexander, the Principal of Lincoln Strategies, LLC, has helped many firms obtain Professional Services Schedule contracts. He can be reached at (978) 369-1140, or dave.alexander@LincolnStrategies.com.