Broken in 2005, still broken in 2026: GSA's schedule pricing
Summary
A GSA inspector general audit of the government's central buying catalog found that 77 of 100 frequently purchased products carried a price gap of more than 50 percent between the cheapest and priciest version of the same item on schedule -- lithium AA batteries ranged from $2.04 to $94.51, a 4,533 percent spread. Federal buyers are allowed to skip their own price check because GSA has already certified the pricing as fair and reasonable. GAO flagged breakdowns in GSA's pricing tools and audit coverage back in 2005; GSA's own inspector general writes in this report that some of the same catalog problems it identified in 2005 'still exist over 20 years later.' The fix that would let customer agencies protect themselves -- telling them to check prices independently -- is one of two recommendations the FAS Commissioner rejected.
A catalog agencies are told they can trust
Under FAR 8.404(d)⧉, federal customer agencies buying through 's Multiple Award Schedule (MAS) Program are not required to make their own determination that a price is fair and reasonable -- has already made that call when it awarded the contract. GSA's inspector general tested that assumption⧉ by sampling 100 frequently purchased products across four schedule categories, using a year of Advantage! transaction data. Result: 77 of the 100 products had price variability of more than 50 percent between the lowest and highest schedule price for the same item, and at times the gap exceeded 1,000 percent. A water filter sold for anywhere from $7.27 to $155.91 -- a 2,045 percent spread. After adjusted for apparent data-entry errors, 71 of the 100 products still showed variability over 50 percent, and 33 of those topped 100 percent.
View data as table
| Lithium AA batteries | 4,533% | $2.04 - $94.51 |
|---|---|---|
| Water filter | 2,045% | $7.27 - $155.91 |
| USB-C Dock G5 | 1,147% | $142.31 - $1,774.16 |
| Black toner cartridge (HEWCF360A) | 868% | $16.62 - $160.90 |
| Cyan toner cartridge (CE341A) | 556% | $74.20 - $487.07 |
| 4K UHD LED display | 485% | $235.39 - $1,376.44 |
| Standard staples | 222% | $1.30 - $4.19 |
| Black toner cartridge (CF230A) | 208% | $27.31 - $84.16 |
How prices got this far apart
traced the variability to three failures. First, contracting officers weren't checking proposed prices against the government's own pricing tool: one officer ran market research on just 15 of 28,306 products that had already tripped the pricing system's threshold -- 0.05 percent of them -- then certified all 28,306 as fair and reasonable; 's own review found awarded prices exceeded that threshold by as much as 1,125 percent. Second, contractors were feeding bad data into GSA Advantage!⧉ -- 93 of the 100 sampled products had inaccurate schedule prices, part numbers, units of measure, or manufacturer names, including a computer monitor listed at $6.09 from one contractor and $1,077.51 from another, the $6.09 an apparent typo nobody caught. Third, 's own program for catching outlier pricing across the whole schedule -- the Competitive Pricing Initiative -- has been run twice, in 2015 and 2021, and not since; the agency attributes the gap to the pandemic.
View data as table
| Products sampled | 100 |
|---|---|
| With price variability over 50% | 77 |
| Still over 50% after adjusting for data errors | 71 |
| Of those, over 100% variability | 33 |
Two decades of the same warning
This is not a new failure mode. GAO reported in 2005⧉ that as MAS sales grew more than fivefold -- from $5.6 billion to $32.5 billion between fiscal 1997 and 2004 -- 's ability to negotiate and verify fair pricing was eroding, not improving. A review of its own fiscal 2003 contract files found nearly 60 percent lacked documentation to show prices were effectively negotiated. The independent checks that once caught bad pricing had been cut: pre-award pricing audits fell from an average of 125 a year in the early-to-mid 1990s to about 21 a year by the early 2000s, and postaward audits -- which had recovered an average of $18 million a year -- were discontinued in 1997 on the assumption pre-award audits would expand to cover the gap. They didn't. 's four recommendations that year all went toward rebuilding those checks; agreed to every one. The 2026 audit cites a different 2005 report, on the Advantage! catalog itself, and states plainly that the problems it found then "still exist over 20 years later."
View data as table
| Avg. per year, FY1992-1996 | 125 | |
|---|---|---|
| Avg. per year, FY1998-2004 | 21 | postaward audits, which recovered $18M/year, were discontinued in 1997 |
View data as table
| FY1997 | 5.6 |
|---|---|
| FY2004 | 32.5 |
The fix GSA's own commissioner didn't take
's 2026 report made five recommendations. The FAS Commissioner agreed to resume the paused Competitive Pricing Initiative, provide better sampling guidance to contracting officers, and tighten controls on how contractors submit temporary price cuts. He partially agreed to fix the data-inaccuracy problems in FAS's own pricing tools. He disagreed with telling federal customer agencies that -- given the variability just documented -- they should be performing their own independent price checks rather than relying on 's certification. The regulation that lets agencies skip that check remains unchanged; so, per this report, does the pricing it's supposed to protect them from.
The takeaway
- The regulation tells agencies they don't need to check 's prices. 's own auditors just showed why they might want to. 77 of 100 sampled products had more than 50 percent price variability for the identical item on the same catalog.
- This is the same failure documented in 2005, not a new one. MAS sales grew more than fivefold while pricing audits collapsed by roughly 83 percent -- and 's 2026 report cites its own 2005 predecessor finding the same catalog problems, unresolved, over 20 years later.
- The one fix that would let agencies protect themselves is the one rejected. The FAS Commissioner agreed to resume paused pricing reviews and tighten internal controls, but disagreed with recommending that customer agencies independently verify prices given the variability documented.
Figures are from -05-229 (2005) and Report A240052/Q/6/P26001 (Feb. 2026), read directly. The two reports examine related but distinct failure modes within the same MAS pricing-oversight problem -- 's audit-tool erosion in 2005 and 's catalog price variability in 2026 -- and are not a single continuous study; the '21 years' figure marks the span between them, not a claim that either document tracked the same metric over time. 's own report separately cites a different 2005 report on the Advantage! catalog system as still-unresolved.
Sources(2) ▾
- U.S. Government Accountability Office, Contract Management: Opportunities to Improve Pricing of GSA Multiple Award Schedules Contracts (GAO-05-229) (2005-03-14) — MAS program sales growth (fivefold, FY1997-2004), the roughly 60% contract-file documentation failure rate itself found, the collapse in pre-award and postaward pricing audits, and 's four recommendations (which agreed with) gao.gov · original document
- General Services Administration Office of Inspector General, Federal Agencies Are at Risk of Overpaying for Products in the Multiple Award Schedule Program Due to Significant Price Variability (Report Number A240052/Q/6/P26001) (2026-02-12) — the 100-product pricing sample and its 77/71/33 breakdown, the individual product price-variability examples (Figure 1), the pricing-support and data-accuracy failure rates, the contracting-officer examples, the report's own citation of its 2005 predecessor finding the same catalog problems, the paused Competitive Pricing Initiative, and the FAS Commissioner's partial disagreement with the recommendations gsaig.gov · original document
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Federal agencies buying off 's Multiple Award Schedule are legally allowed to skip their own price check -- the regulation says has already determined the price is fair and reasonable at the point of award. 's own inspector general just tested what that certification is worth. In a sample of 100 frequently purchased products, 77 had a gap of more than 50 percent between the cheapest and priciest version of the identical item on the same catalog; at times the gap topped 1,000 percent. Lithium AA batteries ranged from $2.04 to $94.51 apiece. None of this is new: documented the same negotiator tools failing and the same audits disappearing in 2005. The inspector general's own 2026 report cites its 2005 predecessor and says the problems it flagged then "still exist over 20 years later."