The article examines the role of the catalogue of goods, works, and services for state and municipal needs in describing public procurement facilities in the process of transition to digital government contracts. The catalogue of goods, works, and services is considered both as an element of digital contracts and as a tool for ensuring the quality of purchased products, which, in turn, is a consequence of the existence of the problem of information asymmetry. Taking into account the review of Russian and foreign scientific literature on the value of product cataloguing in public procurement, the problems and challenges of digitalization in concluding government contracts, including those related to their regulation, the author hypothesizes about the insufficiency of product quality requirements contained in the catalogue, which is a significant obstacle to the execution of government contracts and the transition to digital government contracts. Based on the analysis of the survey results and an extended interview, these hypotheses are confirmed. As conclusions based on the results of the study, taking into account the obstacles to cataloguing goods, the author formulated the main reasons for the incomplete implementation of the potential of the catalogue of goods, works, and services in public procurement: an insufficient number of characteristics of goods in many positions of the catalogue, its insufficient visualization, as well as the unresolved problem of the complete transfer of government contracts to digital format.