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Methodology

One vendor, one record

Federal award data spells the same business many ways. Getting incumbents right means resolving those spellings before anything is counted.

Why names lie

A vendor appears in award data as whatever a contracting officer typed, at the time, into the system of record. Over ten years that produces a legal name with and without the corporate suffix, a DBA, an abbreviation, a division name, a parent company, a merger, and a handful of plain typos. Counting awards by raw name splits one shop into five and hides the incumbent you need to see.

The resolution order

  1. 1

    Unique Entity ID (UEI)

    When a record carries a UEI, that is the business. Two records with the same UEI are the same vendor, whatever the name says.

  2. 2

    CAGE code

    When there is no UEI but there is a CAGE code, the CAGE code decides. Different CAGE codes under one UEI are different locations of one business and stay together.

  3. 3

    Normalized name

    With neither identifier, the name is normalized: uppercase, punctuation removed, corporate suffixes and articles dropped, "and" and "&" made the same, DBA tails removed. An exact normalized match joins an existing record only when that record does not carry a conflicting UEI.

  4. 4

    Enrichment from SAM registrations

    Where a vendor matches an active SAM registration by UEI, the registration adds small business types, the NAICS list, city and website. Parent names come from the award detail pass.

  5. 5

    Suggested merges, reviewed by a person

    Records with the same normalized name but different identifiers, and near-identical names in the same state, are listed for review. Merges move every award to one record and keep the old record as a pointer, so nothing is lost and a wrong merge can be undone.

What resolution does not do

It does not guess corporate ownership beyond what the sources state. It does not merge records on name similarity alone without review. It does not decide that two businesses in different states with similar names are one. When in doubt, the records stay apart, because a false merge is worse than a missed one.

Every vendor profile lists the names seen in the data. If you know two records are one business, tell us and a person will look.

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