Using an Electronic Signature to Secure Your Private Bids
If you plan to place bids for many of the lucrative government contracts that come up each year, you are going to find that using the postal service or a courier is no longer the most common method employed to submit these bids. For many years federal and local governments have been required by law to place requests for bids on many of the items they buy and services that they must secure from outside vendors. This is done to allow a number of contractors to bid on each project and give each of them an equal chance of landing the contract.
It also allows the government agency the opportunity to seek out a vendor that can supply what is needed at a price that is going to fit into their continually shrinking budget. For many years these bids were submitted in writing and placed in a sealed envelope that would be opened only after the deadline for submitting bids had passed. Each bid had to be signed by an agent of the bidding company and delivered via registered mail or courier so that it could be date and time stamped. The acceptance of an electronic signature has changed the face of submitting bids and made the process far simpler in many ways.
One of the biggest problems with using the mail in bid was that it often required months in order to give every vendor who might be interested in submitting a bid not only enough time to put together their bid, but to ensure that it had sufficient time to arrive at the appropriate location. In many cases this system failed as bids ended up getting lost in the mail or not delivered on time. There were also cases in which bids were intercepted and tampered with in order for another company to gain a contract that they might not have otherwise been awarded. Here again you will find that the use of the electronic signature has made significant improvements to the process.
Today, thanks to the enactment of both UNETA and the ESIGN Act, a bid can be submitted electronically via email and with the use of a digital signature be considered just as legitimate as one that has been submitted via regular mail or courier service. In fact you will find that because the digital signature is only attached to the bid at the moment it is electronically submitted, this makes it virtually impossible for anyone to tamper with it.
On top of this the use of email and the electronic signature places an exact time and date stamp on the bid that is irrefutable should an occasion arise where the validity of a bid being submitted in a timely manner is questioned. If you place your bid using the Digi-Seal Server available from us at Digi-Sign, you are required to fill out a number of forms online that we will attach to your bid documentation. These forms will form a part of the digital signature that is used to prove the authenticity of your bid once it has been submitted.
Once you have completed the forms and submitted your bid, if anyone should attempt to tamper with it, our secure system is designed to detect this and notify us and you of it. It will also inform the person on the other end who is reading your bid that it was altered after the time it was submitted; this way they can contact you to see if you are the one who made the changes or if in fact, someone has been tampering with your bid who was not authorized to do so. This is something that could never have happened prior to the implementation of the digital signature and was in the end responsible for more than one lost contract due to supposedly sealed bids being tampered with.
Since 2008 the use of a digital signature for government contract bids has been approved and it is now possible for a company to actually place a bid within seconds of the cutoff time. This is because each bid is not only submitted electronically but time stamped to show the exact time of posting. At Digi-Sign we can provide you with complete digital signature services that will guarantee your bids arrive on time and meet all established US and Canadian bid requirements regarding digital signatures and electronic submissions to help you win more of those lucrative government contracts.
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