Everything Old is New Again-- A Revisit of the beta.sam.gov Website Four Months Later.
“Everything right is wrong again
Just like in the long long trailer
All the dishes got broken and the car kept driving
And nobody would stop to save her”
— They Might Be Giants
In June we posted a blog discussing the beta.sam.gov website that is the new home of the Department of Labor (“DOL”) wage determinations – both Service Contract Act and Davis-Bacon Act. The website consolidated and updated the old WDOL website with other GAO legacy websites. You can visit that earlier blog here; https://www.awrcounsel.com/blog/2019/6/19/betasamgov-goes-live-with-wage-determinations-and-other-resources?rq=sam.
The point of this post is to revisit some of the issues that had plagued the site in June to see if anything has changed. In addition, we will mention some other problems that we found when attempting to use the site in practice.
First, the beta.sam.gov website remains the official DOL website for wage determinations. In addition, it has officially replaced other legacy websites. But this blog is focused only on the wage and hour issues related to beta.sam.gov.
While the website’s wage determination search quirks have diminished, problems remain. The keyword search is not for searching by job title but by county or state. Nor does it pull up the old library resources for wage and hour which have migrated to the website. However, searching by job title may not be particularly helpful because presumably there are many counties with the same job description around the country. Another issue that we noticed is the lack of older wage determinations from before 2003. These would be important archival information that was included in the previous website and it would be useful to include these in the new website as well.
In addition, many of the resources provided by the website in its Wage Determinations Learning Center contain broken hyperlinks leading to Page Not Found HTML web pages. As of this writing, both the link to the SCA Directory of Occupations, 4th Edition, and the link to the Davis Bacon Act are broken. Much of the other information on the website remains viable, like the interagency memos and the content information for the labor advisors. But the old www.wdol.gov library isn’t completely transported to beta.sam.gov without any breaks and no new materials have been added. For example, if you go to the beta.sam.gov home page and search for wage determinations, absolutely nothing of value comes up. And if you are fortunate enough to know to go to the wage and hour specialty subpage, https://beta.sam.gov/help/wage-determination-resources, if you search the All Agency Memorandum materials you will see the AAMs begin in July 28, 2016, with AAM 221, and all the earlier historical resources have been removed.
Overall the website is still working out some kinks and although there is a feedback button, it may be useful to allow users to open tickets that identify specific issues, such as broken links or missing wage determinations. While the beta.sam.gov website does a fairly good job of providing continuity of recent wage and hour resources for the contractors and government agencies, it is no enhancement to the previous situation, and in many ways it is a diminution of services.