In an effort to support large commodity solutions, the NIH Information Technology Acquisition and Assessment Center (NITAAC) announce today that it will now implement a $70,000 fee cap for all orders under the Chief Information Officer Commodities and Solutions (CIO-CS) Government Wide Acquisition Contract (GWAC). The fee cap applies to any order base or optional period (not to exceed 12 months) with funding in excess of $20 million.

The Office of Management and Budget encourages federal agencies to use GWACs to aggregate buying power and streamline the acquisition of IT products and services. The NIH Contract Access Fee (NCAF) reimburses NIH for the cost of operating and administering its GWACs. Currently, the NCAF for the CIO-CS contract is set at 0.35 percent of the total award value. Under the newly implemented fee cap, any award exceeding $20 million that would have resulted in an NCAF of over $70,000, will instead be capped at $70,000.

“At NITAAC, we are looking constantly for ways to get industry leading products and services into the hands of government agencies at the lowest possible cost,” said NITAAC Acting Director Bridget Gauer. “In our conversations with agency customers, it had become readily apparent that infinitely scaling acquisition fees were negatively impacting the cost feasibility of large scale procurements. The newly implemented fee cap dismantles these cost barriers for large orders and will provide lasting value as agencies continue to phase out their legacy technologies through large scale IT acquisitions and modernizations.”

The CIO-CS GWAC is a five year Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity contract vehicle that is capable of providing any government agency with information technology commodities and solutions. The contract includes health and biomedical-related IT commodities, in addition to a wide variety of general IT commodities. For a full list of commodities and solutions offered through CIO-CS, or to learn more about the contract vehicle, please visit www.nitaac.nih.gov/services/cio-cs. If you have a specific question regarding the cap on the NCAF, please feel free to contact the NITAAC Customer Support Center at 1-888-773-6542 or NITAACsupport@nih.gov.