Eliminate FSSI BPA purchasing
We need to eliminate the Federal Strategic Sourcing Initiative for purchasing office supplies for it is no savings at all. As a Inventory manager I use the GSA advantage for majority of purchases and am mandated to purchase from 15 sole source vendors on the list from the FSSI BPA, when on the general schedule there are other small business that have the same items at lower cost. If you compare the products on the GSA ...more »
We need to eliminate the Federal Strategic Sourcing Initiative for purchasing office supplies for it is no savings at all. As a Inventory manager I use the GSA advantage for majority of purchases and am mandated to purchase from 15 sole source vendors on the list from the FSSI BPA, when on the general schedule there are other small business that have the same items at lower cost.
If you compare the products on the GSA FSSI BPA to GSA general schedule you will find that over 80% of the items are overpriced on the FSSI. Given many agencies are mandated to purchase this way, where is there any cost saving to the taxpayer. Our division alone will be spending more than $17000.00 this FY just on Xerox copy paper. Multiply that by how many purchases are made nation wide. All we have done was given an advantage to 15 vendors creating a monopoly, and perhaps putting some small vendors out of business creating an economic hardship for them. Many of the small vendors are minority and veteran owned. Given the current state of the economy and federal spending we need to support small business and reduce our costs to purchase items.
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