Delivering transparency in government

 

Global Computer Enterprises, Inc. (GCE) furthered its commitment to bringing transparency to federal government spending with the launch of the FFATA Information Center. The portal offers free, instant access to contracts and grants awarded across the federal government via a user-friendly free text search and dynamic reporting tool. No login or registration is required – the public has instant access to federal spending information and the ability to create custom reports from that information. This site is not associated with any government agency and is provided free of charge from GCE.

By providing more transparency in government, this site is the easy way to track federal spending and your tax dollars at work. Users are able to search government contracts, grants data, and earmark grants from the appropriations process.

The engine behind the FFATA.org site is a Google™-like search tool that provides full text searching of both the federal procurement data available in FPDS-NG and grants data available from FAADS. The FFATA.org search adheres to several key principles in the delivery of this critical information about federal spending:

• Transparency: Transparency is defined as the full, accurate, and timely disclosure of information. The FFATA law requires the establishment of a site with the ability for a user to search and view unchanged, authoritative data.
• Single version of the truth: Our solution provides a search engine that will search authoritative repositories of federal spending data and provide a single version of the truth. If a user searches using GCE’s solution and they go to the FPDS-NG or the FAADS sites individually, they will see the same information since there is only one source of the data.
• Data integrity: Data integrity ensures that any operation performed on the data does not change the data, delete any data, or add any data not authorized by the data’s owner. Data integrity is simply the assurance that data is consistent and correct.
• Timeliness: The FFATA.org search engine provides access to all federal spending data as soon as it is made available. The federal procurement data is available the next business day from the contracting agency submitting the data. The grants data will be indexed and available within 48 hours of the posting of a new grants data file. These files are currently available quarterly.
• Ease of Use: The Google™-like search tool is simple and easy for everyone wanting to learn more about how their tax dollars are spent. It works on the same principle as the Google™ web search tool and allows users to search federal spending data just as they search web sites today using Google™. The user types in a phrase and the result is returned containing every action where the phrase can be found. The phrase could be in the vendor name field, the action description field, or any other field contained in the data being searched.