About This Issue

The Top 200 Federal Contractors issue is our annual snapshot of the biggest companies serving the federal procurement market.

Our data-processing partner, Eagle Eye Publishers Inc. of Fairfax, Va., combs through federal procurement data each year for us, making sense of all the variables that come into play to generate the lists that appear in these pages.

The data are contained in the General Services Administration's Federal Procurement Data System-Next Generation for fiscal 2008. The system gets its information from contracting reports filed by agencies.

Most vendors in the rankings are private, for-profit U.S. companies. Universities, nonprofit institutions and foreign-owned firms also are represented.

Eagle Eye analyzes the data to generate lists of parent companies. Then, outlays to subsidiaries are "rolled up" to the parent. That provides a more accurate view of the amount of dollars that flow to the largest federal contractors.

For joint ventures, we assign each partner an equal portion of payments made under the contract in fiscal 2008. Mergers and acquisitions are not reflected in the listings unless they became final before the fiscal year ended. Of course, there's much more data available than we are able to print in one issue of Government Executive.

To find out more, or to learn more about how these rankings are generated, contact Eagle Eye Publishers at (703) 359-8980, on the Web at www.eagleeyeinc.com, or via e-mail at info@eagleeyeinc.com.