The gears of protest resolution at the General Accountability Office have ground to a halt due to the government shutdown but not so long ago, those protest gears were turning. And during that time, GAO sustained the protest of Island Peer Review Organization, Inc., d/b/a IPRO, B-417298.2, 2025 CPD ¶ 218 (Sept. 2025) due to an agency’s insufficient documentation of an evaluation process. What makes this one especially interesting is that getting a sustain on a protest based on inadequate documentation is somewhat rare. When it comes to inadequate documentation, it is more likely an agency takes corrective action, which shields the agency from having to share (under a protective order) source selection information. Or in many cases, if the protest makes it all the way to the comments portion of the protest, GAO finds that an agency did provide sufficient documentation. Read on to learn what it took for this protester to succeed on the inadequate documentation claim.
Let’s start at the beginning before we dive into the substance of this decision. In July 2024, the Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) issued a task order request for proposals (TORP) under CMS’s Network of Quality Improvement and Innovation Contractors indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract. The TORP sought contractors to act as quality improvement organizations (QIOs) for CMS’s quality improvement network (QIN) QIO program and planned to award a cost-plus-fixed-fee task order with one 60-month period of performance.
Offerors were required to satisfy a QIO eligibility assessment by meeting certain “prequalification criteria,” and offerors would be rated using an acceptable/unacceptable basis. This required offerors to “adequately demonstrate that they meet the eligibility requirements and definition of a QIO,” and the prime contractor-offerors were required to meet the eligibility assessment on their own, without help from any planned subcontractors. Evaluations were made using a best-value tradeoff focusing on four factors: “approach to achieving quality outcomes; portfolio and program management plan for the region; staffing; and cost/price.”
We will focus on the two parties relevant to this protest: the protester, Island Peer Review Organization (IPRO), and the eventual awardee, Superior Health. Superior Health’s proposal received higher ratings in the technical categories and came with a (marginally) lower cost, and CMS accordingly awarded the task order to Superior Health.
Following award, IPRO protested. In the protest, IPRO challenged the agency’s evaluation of Superior Health’s proposal under the QIO eligibility assessment. IPRO alleged that Superior Health has no employees and therefore cannot satisfy the solicitation’s prequalification criteria without reliance on subcontractors. GAO emphasized that the QIO eligibility requirement was intended to be a gateway requirement rated on an “acceptable/unacceptable” basis. As noted earlier, the solicitation terms emphasized that the assessment “should only include relevant experience and other information of the prime contractor, not subcontractors.”
Superior Health’s QIO eligibility assessment stated that it was established as a joint venture composed of eight member organizations which included various hospitals and health care organizations throughout the Midwest. However, areas of the proposal more specifically referred to individual members as “subcontractors” and to Superior Health as the “prime contractor.” Additionally, Superior Health stated that its key personnel were employed by subcontractors. Despite this departure from the solicitation’s terms, the agency nevertheless rated Superior Health’s proposal as acceptable under the QIO eligibility assessment.
Why does this matter? Well, federal procurement law requires an agency to evaluate proposals consistent with the terms of the solicitation. GAO typically affords procurement officers a good deal of discretion in that evaluation process, but GAO will review the evaluation to determine if it was unreasonable, inconsistent with the solicitation’s stated evaluation criteria, or undocumented. As mentioned, it is rare for GAO to sustain a protest based on inadequate documentation, but that is precisely what GAO did here.
GAO observed that, like the other proposals, CMS documented Superior Health’s proposal as a table with three columns: one showing the relevant consideration, another showing whether that consideration was satisfied, and a third quoting language from the proposal which, “presumably,” was relevant to the agency’s consideration. GAO took special notice of the absence of any discussion or analysis of how the quoted proposal language met the relevant evaluation consideration.
IPRO challenged Superior Health’s proposal as relying on its subcontractors to meet the eligibility criteria, in direct violation of the solicitation’s terms. IPRO further argued that the record did not reflect any consideration of whether Superior Health based its QIO eligibility assessment narrative on its experience as a prime contractor, as required. GAO requested briefing from CMS on the agency’s process of determining QIO eligibility to further develop the record on that point.
Based on the answers received and the remainder of the record, GAO determined that CMS’s evaluation under the QIO eligibility assessment was unreasonable. GAO, in a frank assessment, noted: “In short, based on our review of the record, it was not clear how the agency reached its conclusion to rate the awardee’s proposal as acceptable.” There was simply no contemporaneous documentation of how CMS determined that Superior Health satisfied the QIO criteria on the merits of its own organization. There was no discussion or analysis from the agency documented in the record and nothing in the table to indicate or explain how the quoted language satisfied the relevant requirement. This was, by definition, unreasonable—one cannot argue a decision was made reasonably if one cannot demonstrate the reasoning behind the decision.
GAO also emphasized that the agency failed to address the inconsistencies in Superior Health’s proposal regarding its organizational structure and did not clarify how CMS determined Superior Health met the QIO eligibility assessment on its own merits. This was significant precisely because the solicitation established that QIO eligibility had to be based on prime contractor experience, not subcontractors.
This lack of documentation regarding how the agency determined that Superior Health met a requirement explicitly established by the solicitation directly prejudiced IPRO. Superior Health and IPRO were the only offerors remaining in the competition by the time the evaluations were conducted, and therefore, had the agency reevaluated Superior Health and found that they were ineligible, IPRO would have been in line for the task order.
This case demonstrates the relatively high bar a protester must clear if they are to succeed on an inadequate documentation claim. Here, the agency provided next to no documentation of their decision process—only what was effectively a grading rubric, with no written discussion or explanation of how they arrived at the decision they did. When the agency fails to disclose its reasoning, it renders its decision-making process unreasonable by default, and thus IPRO was able to win the day.
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