Protecting your Trade Secrets, Commercial, and Financial Information

An application may include technical data and other data, including trade secrets and commercial or financial information that are privileged or confidential, which the applicant does not want disclosed to the public or used by the Government for any purpose other than application evaluation. Examples of documents that may contain proprietary information include the commercialization plan and the project narrative.

Note that the SBA Commercialization History and the Foreign Relations Disclosure form documents are permitted to contain proprietary information and do not require applicant markings as they are pre-populated with data protection legends.

To protect such data, the following guidelines must be followed:

  1. The following legend must appear on the title page of the document:

    This proposal contains information that shall not be disclosed outside the Federal Government and shall not be duplicated, used, or disclosed in whole or in part for any purpose other than evaluation of this proposal, unless authorized by law. The Government shall have the right to duplicate, use, or disclose the data to the extent provided in the resulting contract if award is made as a result of the submission of this proposal. The information subject to these restrictions are contained on all pages of the proposal except for pages [insert page numbers or other identification of pages that contain no restricted information.]

    and

  2. The following legend must appear on each page of the proposal that contains information the Applicant wishes to protect:

    Use or disclosure of information contained on this sheet is subject to the restriction on the title page of this proposal.

    Proprietary Markings Example