Why vendor names lie

One shop, many spellings

Look up any active supplier in ten years of award data and you will usually find more than one name. The legal name with "Inc." One with "Incorporated." One in all capitals with the comma dropped. One with a "DBA" trade name the contracting officer typed from a quote. A name from before a move, a sale, or a rebrand.

None of these are errors in the usual sense. Each record was correct when it was written. The name on an award is the name in the vendor's registration on that day, or the name the buyer entered, and both change over time.

The result is that a naive count of vendors in your part category is too high, and the share held by the largest one is too low. Several names in the list can be a single shop.

The identifiers, and what each one is tied to

Three identifiers appear in award records, and they do not mean the same thing.

• UEI. The Unique Entity ID issued by SAM.gov. One per registered entity. It replaced the DUNS number in April 2022, so records before then do not carry it.
• DUNS. The older number issued by Dun and Bradstreet. Records for more than a decade were keyed to it. It still appears on historical actions and is the only way to link many of them to a modern entity.
• CAGE code. Assigned by DLA to a facility at an address. A company with several plants can have several CAGE codes. A company that moves may get a new one. Buyers and DIBBS think in CAGE codes; SAM.gov thinks in UEIs.

Any one of these can link records that a name search would miss. None of them alone is enough, because entities change identifiers, and identifiers change hands.

Subsidiaries, parents, and sales

Large suppliers are trees. A parent company registers many subsidiaries, each with its own UEI and CAGE, each winning awards under its own name. The registration includes a parent field, but it is not always current and not always filled in. If you only count the parent's name, you miss most of what the family wins.

Small shops change hands too. A shop that is sold may keep its CAGE code and its contracts but register under a new legal name and UEI. The new owner inherits the incumbency. The award record, read literally, shows an old vendor that vanished and a new vendor that appeared with a full order book on day one.

Why a clean incumbent record matters

Three decisions depend on it.

1. Whether to quote. If a single shop under several names holds nearly every award in your category from a buyer, you are up against a settled relationship, and you should know that before you spend a week on a quote.
2. When to move. Recompete timing depends on the incumbent's contracts. If you cannot join the incumbent's records, you cannot see all of their end dates.
3. Who to approach. Some of the best work for a small shop is subcontracting to the incumbent. You cannot approach a company you have not correctly identified.

How LastAwarded resolves names

The app groups records into one entity using the identifiers first, then the registration history, then careful matching on name and address. When the evidence is thin, it leaves records apart rather than guess. The entity resolution methodology page describes the rules and the cases the app deliberately does not join.

The goal is not a perfect list. It is a list that says one shop when it is one shop, so the counts you build on it are honest.