TAA Compliance is Your Responsibility

How can you be sure the products you supply are TAA compliant? The General Services Agreement (GSA) is quite clear that the burden of TAA compliance falls upon the contractor supplying on the agreement. Simply stating "our supplier said the products are TAA compliant" will not stand up to the scrutiny of a False Claims Act (FCA) lawsuit or action by the Department of Justice. To ensure TAA compliance, the GSA recommends all GSA contractors: 

1. Create procedures to monitor and provide updated product country of origin information to contract administrators.
2. Form procedures to archive historical product country of origin information for future reference.
3. Obtain a written TAA certification form from suppliers.

Ensuring TAA compliance with communications gear like transceivers, DACs and AOCs can be difficult. Major manufacturing centers like the People's Republic of China and Malaysia are not found on the TAA designated countries list (see here for the full list). 

Finding TAA compliant compatible transceivers, DACs and AOCs may be difficult, but not impossible. ProLabs understands TAA requirements and offers a TAA compliant compatible transceiver product.

ProLabs achieves TAA compliance by providing substantial transformation at their Tustin, California facility. Transceivers are received from their supply chain without programming. The transceivers are programmed to order and tested in their lab for full OEM and application compatibility. ProLabs maintains strict version control of programming code and only applies code that has been qualified with that piece of hardware. The process provides the substantial transformation required by US Customs and Border Patrol to classify the country of origin of ProLabs transceivers to the United States. 

ProLabs' innovative Data Traveler System™ (DTS) documents this substantial transformation at each step of the process. The DTS documents the programming of each optical transceiver by serial number. The DTS form is available on demand for each optic they ship, providing the documentation required to demonstrate substantial transformation and country of origin.

ProLabs ships over one million TAA compliant transceivers per year. No other compatible optical transceiver supplier offers the robust processes and documentation to ensure the compatible optics you purchase are verifiable as TAA compliant. This is why so many enterprise, data center and service provider customers trust buying their OEM compatible products from ProLabs. Click here for ProLabs' formal TAA Statement. 

Click here to learn more about ProLabs, and click here to contact your local Accu-Tech representative. 

Content provided by Ray Hagen at ProLabs.