SAM.gov Changes Entity Administrator Requirement
Recipients and applicants of financial assistance should be aware of a recent change concerning the “entity administrator” role at SAM.gov. As of Monday, the entity administrator role can only be held by employees, officers and board members of an entity in an effort to enhance security and hold entities accountable for who can update SAM.gov registrations.
Some entities currently use an outside service to manage their registration. SAM.gov is still enabling these services to conduct these roles, but they cannot serve as the entity administrator. Now, when someone registers and updates an entity in SAM.gov, he or she must identify his or her relationship to the entity, and cannot hold the entity administrator role unless he or she is an employee, officer or board member of the entity. Outside services managing registrations still may receive a “data entry” role that enables them to register new entities, manage updates and renew entity registrations, but they cannot manage user roles.
SAM.gov requires the submission of an entity administrator appointment letter (sometimes known as the notarized letter process) to give access to new entity administrators or for existing registrations where there is no existing administrator. Entities using an entity administrator appointment letter will no longer be able to assign the entity administrator role to a nonemployee.
If an organization currently has an outside entity administrator managing its SAM.gov registration, it now needs to identify an employee, officer or board member to serve in the role as entity administrator. It should send an entity administrator appointment letter electronically to the Federal Service Desk (FSD.gov) naming the new administrator, or ask the outside entity administrator to assign the role to someone in the entity before its next registration update. FSD.gov provides certain letter templates for differing entities (e.g., domestic, international) here. SAM.gov strongly encourages organizations when naming a new person as the entity administrator to also assign at least one additional administrator as a backup in case of staff changes or absences.
Grantees should take a look at their entity administrator status today to ensure they are meeting the latest SAM.gov requirement.
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