Simplified Acquisition & micropurchase thresholds

      Federal civilian agencies now have authority to raise the Simplified Acquisition and micropurchase thresholds starting as soon as possible, without waiting for the Federal Acquisition Regulation Council to act.

      The fiscal 2018 National Defense Authorization Act allowed the Simplified Acquisition threshold to be raised to $250,000 (from $100,000 currently) and the micropurchase threshold to be raised to $10,000 (from $3,500).

      Typically it takes the FAR council months, and sometimes years, to officially incorporate new regulations reflecting changes in law.

      Outlining a path to speed up the process, William Clark, chair of the Civilian Agency Acquisition Council (CAAC), issued a memo to civilian agencies on Feb. 16. The council is overseen by of the General Services Administration’s Office of Governmentwide Policy.

      The council authorized civilian agencies to implement the higher thresholds on their own, before the changes are officially in the FAR. The authorization is effective immediately. The agencies now may apply a class deviation to implement the changes.

      “The CAAC is saying to the agencies, you may want to use the higher thresholds right away. Here is a roadmap to make that easy,” Steve Koprince, a government contracting attorney, told Set-Aside Alert.

      Some of the agencies may take longer to make the changes, depending on how they defined the thresholds.

      There also are longstanding regulations allowing the thresholds to go even higher than the new limits, but only for buys related to certain types of national disasters. More information:

More information: CAAC Memo: http://goo.gl/Mt7tH2
Koprince blog: http://goo.gl/nCkjmX

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