For procurement and purchasing teams
Every vendor checked before the award. Every check on the record.
Before you enter a covered transaction, you verify the vendor is not suspended or debarred. If your evidence of that verification is a screenshot, replace it: federal.contractors monitors your vendor list, runs the check every morning, and seals each one into a record you can produce years later.
The requirement
Written down in the CFR, tested in the audit.
2 CFR 180.300
Verify before a covered transaction
Before entering a covered transaction, you must verify that the vendor is not excluded or disqualified. The rule names checking SAM.gov Exclusions as an accepted method, and a dated check documents that you did.
2 CFR 180.220
Which purchases are covered
Not every purchase is covered. A procurement contract under a covered award is a covered transaction when it is expected to equal or exceed $25,000, along with certain other contracts; routine low-dollar buying is not. Check the ones that are covered and keep the dated verification record.
Single Audit
The item gets tested
The OMB Compliance Supplement makes suspension and debarment verification an audited item for organizations spending federal awards. The packet documents the checks supporting that verification: when each check ran, the dated extract it ran against, and a sealed record you can produce to show it.
Grantees passing federal money down verify subrecipients too; the subrecipient checks page covers that duty.
The compliance file
From vendor list to audit binder.
01
Start from your vendor list
Paste your approved-vendor or accounts-payable list by name, UEI, or CAGE code. Each row is matched against the registry; anything ambiguous is flagged for you to confirm rather than guessed. Public award reporting can suggest more.
02
A sealed record per vendor
Each vendor is checked when monitoring starts and every morning after against the latest successfully validated SAM.gov Exclusions public extract available to that check. Every record separates the check time from the source as-of and retrieval times.
03
Alerts and the monthly digest
If a vendor's status changes mid-contract, the alert lands in your inbox. Once a month, a digest states what was checked and what changed, even when the answer is nothing. That email is itself a dated trace of the monitoring.
04
The packet for the audit binder
For any period, one sealed packet: the monitored vendors with their monitoring dates, every SAM.gov check that ran, and the source snapshot behind each check. Hand the link or the PDF to your auditor.
Each vendor is monitored by its Unique Entity ID (UEI). Names and CAGE codes resolve that identity when you import a list, and a valid UEI does not need a profile in this site's public directory. Sign in free, without a card, and paste your actual vendor list: the import preview separates rows that resolve exactly from rows you must confirm and rows that match nothing, and the free allowance monitors three entities while you evaluate.
Where SAM.gov ends
A free SAM.gov search already satisfies the rule.
2 CFR 180.300 is satisfied by checking SAM.gov yourself before a covered transaction. What we sell is the documentation: checks that run daily without consuming staff time, permanent records that outlast personnel turnover, and a packet that collects a period's diligence into one document. A record is evidence of diligence, not a verdict, and we do not determine eligibility. The methodology page states exactly how checks work and where their limits are.