Last Thursday, the Governor’s Grants Office (GGO) of Maryland hosted a SAM.gov webinar led by a System for Award Management expert to guide new registrants through the SAM registration process (and importantly, some of its quirks). Topics included How to Create a SAM User Account, Migrating Legacy Account Roles/Permissions, and Updating Entity Records. The webinar was attended by more than 200 people.

The recorded version of the webinar and the guide can be found at the GGO’s website. Here is a sample of the Q&A that might touch on issues other organizations have dealt with:

1. We did all the tasks and our status is still showing as inactive at Sam.gov. The person at the help line just repeated the instructions and wouldn’t troubleshoot for us.

The Federal Service Desk (www.fsd.gov) is the supporting help desk for the System for Award Management (SAM). If you are still having challenges, the best thing to do is to re-contact the Federal Service Desk, provide your old ticket numbers for reference, summarize the ongoing issue, and ask to be escalated to Tier 2 for a higher level support.

2. I work with sub-recipients and am new to SAM…. Do I need to register on SAM to check to see if [a nonprofit] organization is in good standing?

You can search for registrant status just by going to https://www.sam.gov, selecting the [Search Records] tab, and entering the nonprofit’s name or DUNS number (the DUNS number will be a more precise search).

The system will give you the Active entity registration records that match your search criteria. That is considered “in good standing.” If you want to see if the entity has an expired registration record in SAM, look on the left side of the screen. Select the Inactive box and [Apply Filters]. The results returned then will include both Active and Inactive records that meet your search criteria.

Please note, sub-recipients are not required to be registered in SAM. They are required to have a DUNS number (per 2CFR, Subtitle A, Chapter I, and Part 25) in order to receive a federal financial assistance sub-award but were not required to be registered in CCR (now SAM). They can be, and are welcome to do so if they wish, but are not required to register in SAM.