Federal government staff largely turned down “gifts” from nine of the largest IT vendors in the year to March 2026, an analysis by the Digital Transformation Agency (DTA) shows.
The analysis [pdf] was triggered by a Salesforce procurement at the National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA), which turned up 118 instances of gifts or hospitality to officials.
The gifts were made leading up to the award of a CRM deal and as “extensive contract variations” were made.
An audit of the CRM deal recommended a broader examination of gifts from vendors, reconciled against declarations from 113 federal entities.
The results of that analysis were quietly published late on Friday.
No major red flags were detected.
AWS, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Rimini Street, SAP, Salesforce, ServiceNow and Data#3 were all asked to report “gift” offers they made to federal government staff.
These figures were then matched up to departmental and agency self-reporting.
Overall, 3662 offers of “gifts and benefits” were made, of which 539 – or 15 percent – were accepted and the remaining 3123 were declined.
While this may sound like a lot, one vendor – ServiceNow – was responsible for 94 percent of the offers.
These appeared to be almost exclusively invitations to “large conference-style events” that were bulk emailed to a federal government database, and only 148 out of 3153 mailed offers were accepted.
IBM also made a significant number of offers – 467 – of which 354 were accepted, and 113 declined.
Other vendors either only made offers in the small single-digits across the year, or – in the case of Rimini Street and Salesforce – made no offers at all.
The DTA found the offers were mostly just related to conference attendance or other professional development opportunities associated with that particular vendor ecosystem.
“Accepted offers were mainly associated with conferences, industry events, professional development, training or hospitality connected to legitimate business engagement,” DTA said.
It added that “some offers that would generally be unacceptable, such as sporting match tickets, were identified in seller data, but all relevant reported cases were declined.”
The DTA is hoping to continue to receive data from the vendors on an ongoing basis.
It said that running the analysis had, in its opinion, “influenced behaviour”.
“The prospective collection process encouraged more deliberate consideration of offers by sellers and [government] employees,” it said.
