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Identification of funding sources depends on cooperation and communication
to ensure the availability of needed information to evaluate requirements
imposed by the funding sources.

9.6.1 LOCATION AND IDENTIFICATION OF THE FUNDING SOURCE

As discussed earlier, public procurements are most often governed by statutory
ethical considerations. One of those requirements is to act in good faith toward
the vending community and to provide all eligible vendors with a fair and equal
opportunity to compete for the work. Responding to a competitive solicitation
can be a tremendous amount of work, requiring the investment of substantial
vendor resources. In keeping with the concept of fair and open competition
and government acting in an appropriate fashion, it is this author’s belief that
a governmental entity should only request that investment of effort if it has
identified the funds to proceed with the procurement. It can be argued the
identification of funds constitutes the government’s good faith in the procure-
ment. However, it should be noted that the identification of funds and the
release of a solicitation do not require the government to make a procurement.
As a general rule, the entity releasing a solicitation reserves the right to not
award a contract for various reasons. It is strongly recommended, however, that
a solicitation not be released without an identified funding stream support-
ing it.
A very different situation is presented if a procurement is established as a
centralized contract or an “indefinite quantity” contract. Unlike the situation
in which a government agency seeks to obtain an AFIS to resolve a specific issue,
an indefinite quantity contract is generally used for commodities (not services)
and is clearly advertised as one for which there is no guarantee of purchase.
The government seeks to establish the contract so that the vehicle is available
for a larger group of authorized purchasers. A single state agency may be
responsible for establishing contracts for statewide purchase and would
have no reason to identify the funding source since there is no guarantee of
purchase.
Reasonable minds differ about whether the amount of available funding
should be released in the RFP. One concern is that the release of the funding
amount will result in cost proposals equal to that amount less one dollar. While
it is a decision that differs by jurisdiction, it should be noted that oftentimes
other publicly available documents detail the funding available. For example,
a governmental agency’s annual budget request may detail how much of its
appropriation will be expended on an AFIS procurement. Similarly, a grant
application and award will identify the funds and available resources commit-
ted to the AFIS project.