Letting someone help with your registration without sharing your password
SAM.gov has a role for a helper who is not part of your business. It is how a third party does the data entry without ever holding your sign-in.
Updated
You do not have to share your login.gov password to let someone help with your SAM.gov registration. Your Entity Administrator can give the helper the Data Entry role, which they accept with their own login.gov account, and the role can be taken back. The representations and certifications stay yours.
Should I give a helper my sign-in?
Somebody has offered to do your SAM.gov registration for you, or you have an accountant or a counselor who is willing to help, and the obvious-looking way to let them is to hand over your sign-in. It is worth knowing that there is a supported way to do this, and that handing over a password is not it.
Your login.gov sign-in is yours. Using someone else's credentials to get into SAM.gov is against the rules that govern both systems, and automated access to login.gov is prohibited outright. Neither of those is a technicality that everybody quietly ignores; they are the reason the supported path exists.
What is the Data Entry role?
SAM.gov has a role, separate from Entity Administrator, for somebody who needs to work on a registration without controlling it. It lets that person enter and update information on your entity's record.
The mechanics are the point. Your own Entity Administrator — who, as a separate guide explains, has to be somebody inside your business — grants the role to the helper. The helper accepts it using their own login.gov account, in their own name. No password changes hands, at any point, in either direction.
You can take the role back. Access granted is access that can be removed, which is not true of a password you have given away.
What can a helper not do for me?
The representations and certifications stay yours. They are statements made to the federal government, in your business's name, and the person answering them has to be somebody who can make them truthfully on the company's behalf. No helper, paid or free, should be clicking through those for you.
If somebody offers to handle your certifications as part of a package, that is the part of the offer to push back on, whatever else is included.
Do I have to pay for help?
Registration in SAM.gov is free at sam.gov. A third party can charge you for their time, and plenty of legitimate ones do, but what they are selling is help with the work rather than access to the system or a faster route through it.
Free help exists too, and it is genuinely free: APEX Accelerators are funded by the Department of Defense to do exactly this, and the Federal Service Desk answers questions about SAM.gov itself at no charge. Those are worth trying before a paid arrangement, not because paid help is wrong, but because you should know what the free version covers first.
A short checklist
If somebody asks for your login.gov username, password, or a code from your phone: no, and that request alone tells you enough about them.
If somebody offers to be your Entity Administrator: no, because the role has to be held inside your business.
If somebody asks your Entity Administrator to grant them a data entry role under their own account: that is the supported arrangement, and it is the one to use.
Free help also exists: APEX Accelerators (DoD-funded, free) and the Federal Service Desk will help you at no charge. We built Firmenza to be useful alongside them.
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