The System for Award Management is an official website of the U.S. Government that is used to register to do business with the U.S. Government. An entity refers to as prime contractors, organizations or individuals applying for assistance awards, those receiving loans, sole proprietors, corporations, partnerships, and any U.S. federal government agencies desiring to do business with the government. Entity can also refer to a party that has been suspended or debarred, is covered by a prohibition or restriction, or is otherwise excluded from doing business with the government.

Contractors may be required to submit periodic reports on contracts that meet certain criteria. Two examples are Service Contract Reporting (SCR) and BioPreferred Reporting. Under SCR, contractors awarded cost-reimbursement, time-and-materials, and labor hour service contracts and orders at or above the simplified acquisition threshold must report information about the amount invoiced, labor hours expended, and subcontractor labor hours to help build a governmentwide service contract inventory. Under the BioPreferred program, contractors awarded service or construction contracts must report purchases of biobased products in the execution of those contracts.

This dataset includes the entity registration data publicly available under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) for those registered in the System for Award Management (SAM) to do business with the Federal government. Each entity is registered with the Unique Entity Identifier (UEI), legal name, dba name, company division, business address, point of contacts name and address, business types, registration date, etc.

Data.gov was launched in 2009 and is managed and hosted by the U.S. General Services. Under the Open Government Data Act, which is Title II of the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act, government data is required to be made available in open, machine-readable formats, while continuing to ensure privacy and security.