Report 17-05: DATA Act Readiness

Our evaluation of SBA’s readiness to meet the requirements of the DATA Act found that SBA developed a project plan prescribed by the eight key steps in Treasury’s DATA Act Implementation Playbook.  We determined that the Agency has made significant progress implementing steps 1-4 of its project plan; however, to fully meet DATA Act requirements, several components remain to be completed.  We also identified two risk areas that may affect the Agency’s ability to meet the DATA Act reporting requirements.  Specifically, SBA (1) had not built its reporting submission specifications Files A and B for grant and contract awards using the current version of the DATA Act Information Model Schema or validated those files using the production release broker, and (2) did not include contract awards executed by its Federal Shared Services Provider when submitting files to the alpha release broker.  We made three recommendations to mitigate the noted risks areas.  Agency officials agreed to implement the recommendations.