Part 1 Trade Agreements Act Compliance

The Trade Agreements Act (19 U.S.C. 2501, et seq.) is the statute which implements numerous multilateral and bilateral international trade agreements and other trade initiatives. Since the estimated dollar value of each Multiple Award Schedule (MAS) exceeds the established Trade Agreements Act (TAA) threshold, the TAA is applicable to all schedules. In accordance with the TAA, only U.S.-made or designated country end products shall be offered and sold under schedule contracts. An end product is an article, material, or supply which will be acquired under the schedule contract for public use. Each schedule contract contains a Trade Agreements Act clause(s) - Clause 52.225-5, Trade Agreements - that defines which signatory countries are acceptable with regard to the products which contractors offer under contract. The clause states, in part, that contractors can provide products which meet the following criteria:

• Is wholly the growth, product, or manufacture of a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) country; or
• In the case of an article which consists in whole or in part of materials from another country, has been substantially transformed in an FTA country into a new and different article of commerce with a name, character, or use distinct from that of the article or articles from which it was transformed.

When you received your contract award(s) or option renewal(s), you certified that each of your end products is a U.S.-made, designated country, Caribbean Basin country, or NAFTA country end product. It is your responsibility to certify and ensure that your products continue to remain compliant with the Trade Agreements Act. You will be held responsible for any non-compliant products which can be discovered through:

• GSA Advantage! system checks
• Competitor complaints
• Industrial Operations Analysts (IOA) visits
• IG audits

Our web service alerts contractors to the presence of "waiver required" country codes within their product data, and supplies detailed error reports, so that contractors may quickly and easily correct their data. When contractors review their catalog and/or contract modification data on our secure website, they cannot complete the approval process if there are items requiring a TAA waiver until they contact us and confirm that they understand the requirement and actually have the TAA waiver.

Part 2, False Claims and Whistleblowers…

Talk About Compliance

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You should take contract compliance seriously… your COs, IOAs, IGs, and competitors certainly do!

Contract Compliance

• Compliance Overview
• Trade Agreements Act
• False Claims and Whistleblowers
• Mandatory EDI Catalog Uploads
• Contract Modifications
• Contractor Report Cards
• Mandatory Disclosure Rule