The Federal government sells billions of dollars worth of surplus assets (e.g., personal property, real estate, financial instruments) to the public each year. Currently, individual agencies use different methods to sell their assets, and asset sale information available on-line is spread out over 163 federal web sites. This decentralized purchasing environment is often confusing to individuals and businesses that wish to purchase surplus federal assets and makes for an inefficient use of taxpayer dollars by failing to leverage potential economies of scale.
The Federal Asset Sales initiative will create a single, one-stop on-line access point for federal asset sales. The future site, www.FedAssetSales.gov, will not only serve as a clearinghouse for information about federal asset sales, it will provide a secure marketplace in which asset buyers and sellers can transact business. Site features will include advanced search capabilities as well as transactional platforms customized for individual asset classes. Additionally, asset buyers will be able to establish and maintain their own customizable customer accounts on the site.
Fed Asset Sales is guided by three key goals of the initiative:
- Goal 1 – Make it easy to find, buy, and sell Federal assets (unify & simplify).
- Goal 2 – Leverage economies of scale to increase return on assets sold, decrease cost of sale, and reach a broader customer base (results-oriented).
- Goal 3 - Take advantage of market driven "best in class" practices and solutions.
By acting as a single-point-of-entry web framework to provide public access for the final purchase of all government-wide asset inventories, FedAssetSales.gov will enable federal agencies to share resources and benefit from increased economies of scale. The project will also dramatically reduce development and maintenance costs for any agency planning to develop its own electronic sales system and will offer those with existing systems an opportunity to access a broader and more coordinated marketplace for customer inquiry and sales. The end result will be both increased revenues and cost savings to the government and enhanced customer satisfaction for agency sellers as well as individual citizen and business buyers. |