GAO: Unequal Exchanges With Offerors by Agency Leads to Sustained Protest

An agency providing an opportunity to substantially revise a proposal can seem too good to be true. And sometimes, it is. It is a fundamental principle of procurement law that offerors must be treated equally. When one offeror is given an opportunity to “fix” the deficiencies in its proposal, but the other offeror is not, that is fundamentally unfair.

As one offeror found out, despite submitting everything to the agency as it was asked, GAO still sustained the protest.

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Agency Not Required To Re-Open Discussions To Address New Weakness

A procuring agency is not required to re-open discussions to address a weakness first presented in an offeror’s revised proposal.

In a recent bid protest decision, the GAO held that an offeror was not entitled to an additional round of discussions when an agency assigned the offeror a significant weakness for an item first included in the offeror’s revised proposal.

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