FederalComputerWeek:

Do contractor ID numbers taint transparency?
Groups recommend government-owned identifier instead

◦By Alice Lipowicz◦Sep 17, 2009
As states near a deadline for their first set of comprehensive reports on economic stimulus spending, a debate is brewing over the government's reliance on a private-sector coding system used to identify the beneficiaries of federal largess.

Under federal rules, stimulus aid recipients — including public agencies, nonprofit organizations and private contractors — must identify themselves in the reports by their Data Universal Numbering System identifiers. Dun and Bradstreet owns and operates the DUNS service.

In accordance with the Obama administration’s push for greater transparency, advocacy groups are reviving long-standing questions about the suitability of corporate ownership of such a critical government database and pointing out ways in which they claim its proprietary nature limits public and agency access to information.

For example, USAspending.gov uses DUNS numbers to identify contractors. But members of the public who want a comprehensive search to reveal the names of those contractors’ parent companies will have a hard time finding that information, said Gary Bass, executive director of OMB Watch, a longtime critic of the DUNS numbers.

“When you want to download certain kinds of data, you are blocked,” Bass said. “For transparency, you do not want a proprietary identifier. The government ideally should have its own identifying number system.” He said the federal Employer Identification Number could serve that purpose.

Thomas Lee, technical lead for Subsidyscope.com, a project led by the Pew Charitable Trusts that seeks to make government spending more transparent, said full public access to the DUNS database is not possible at this time. Although Dun and Bradstreet has allowed access for research purposes, it has done so on a limited basis. “Right now, we have a one-off arrangement that allows us access to some of the data, but we cannot make it publicly available,” he said.

Another concern centers on the completeness and accuracy of the DUNS database. Problems arise when companies merge, split or restructure because units might take on new DUNS numbers at various points in that cycle. Although Dun and Bradstreet defends the accuracy of DUNS, others say it is impossible to verify that accuracy without full access.

“DUNS is good enough to be useful, but it is constantly getting out-of-date,” Lee said, adding that companies would have a much greater incentive to keep their status current if it were a government-run system with required registration.