Award Data

Award Data is the "promise to pay". It is the part of government spending where agreements are made, as either a contract procurement or assistance (grant/loan/insurance). This promise or agreement cannot be made unless an Agency can guarantee they have the funding ("Budget Authority") to do so.

Awards

An "award" is not a distinct data entity coming from any authoritative system with which DATA Act integrates. Rather it is a construct created by and persisted in the USAspending application data store as an award record.

The concept of an "award" exists in Government accounting, and its constituent elements are present in File C from DABS. USAspending identifies two broad categories of awards: (1) contracts, and (2) assistance. Official Government systems track the activity under an "award" as transactions, and USAspending groups together like-transactions into a single Award. USAspending maintains a many-to-one relationship of transaction-to-award.

Award Data Sources

USAspending ingests contract transactions and assistance transactions on a daily basis, which are made available in the authoritative sources that collect and store this information.

• Contract transactions come from the Federal Procurement Data System Next Generation (FPDS-NG)
• Assistance transactions come from the Financial Assistance Broker Submission (FABS) system, which is a subsystem of the DATA Act Broker

The DATA Act Broker actually requires FPDS data to complete the DABS reporting and validation process. So because Broker holds consistent and up-to-date transactions for both contracts and assistance, USAspending loads this data from Broker on a daily basis.

During the load, transaction records are saved into the USAspending database and linked to a newly-created or existing award record. At the end of the FABS Load and at the end of the FPDS Load the C-to-D Linkage process is executed in order to associate any USAspending-created award records to financial accounting records from DABS File C in reported account data. This allows displays or queries of information about account data or award data to benefit from further information provided in its linked domain area.