An 8(a) joint venture failed to obtain SBA’s approval of an addendum to its joint venture agreement—and the lack of SBA approval cost the joint venture an 8(a) contract.
In Alutiiq-Banner Joint Venture, B-412952 et al. (July 15, 2016), GAO sustained a protest challenging an 8(a) joint venture’s eligibility for award where that joint venture had not previously sought (or received) SBA’s approval for an addendum to its joint venture agreement.
It’s the day after you submitted an offer for a big government contract, when one of your key personnel walks into your office. “Thanks for everything you’ve done for me,” she says, “but I’ve decided to take an opportunity elsewhere.”
Employee turnover is a part of doing business. But for prospective government contractors, it can be a nightmare. As highlighted in a recent GAO bid protest, a offeror was excluded from the award simply because one of its proposed key personnel resigned after the proposal was submitted.
It’s a harsh result, but it highlights that contractors must not only attract key personnel—they must also retain them.
The HUBZone program will see significant changes to its rules as a result of major SBA changes set to take effect in late August.
These changes apply generally to two aspects of the HUBZone program: that relating to the SBA’s processing of HUBZone applications, and a significant expansion of the HUBZone joint venture requirements.
On Friday, Steven wrote about the framework of the new SBA small business mentor-protégé program. As part of this significant program addition, SBA’s final rule includes details about the requirements a small business joint venture must satisfy in order to be qualified to perform a small business set-aside. This post will briefly discuss those requirements.
The analysis of an offeror’s past performance is sometimes a crucial part of an agency’s evaluation of proposals. And an agency’s evaluation of past performance is ordinarily a matter of agency discretion.
Though broad, this discretion is not unlimited. An agency’s past performance evaluation must be consistent with the solicitation’s evaluation criteria. GAO recently reaffirmed this rule, by sustaining a protest challenging an agency’s departure from its own definition of relevant past performance.
Ordinarily, whether an offeror’s proposed personnel actually perform under a contract is a non-protestable matter of contract administration. But GAO will consider the issue when an offeror proposes personnel that it did not have a reasonable basis to expect to provide during contract performance in order to obtain a more favorable evaluation. Such a “bait and switch” amounts to a material misrepresentation that undermines the integrity of the procurement and evaluation.
That’s exactly what happened in a recent protest, where the GAO disqualified the awardee from competition after determining that its proposal misrepresented the incumbent employees’ availability to continue working under the contract.
SBA’s regulations provide that an 8(a) program participant that no longer is owned or controlled by socially and economically disadvantaged person can be terminated from the 8(a) program. But the decision to terminate is not one to be made lightly: SBA must make sure that it not only has evidence in support of its termination decision, it must also explain how that evidence demonstrates its conclusions.
This requirement was at issue in a recent court decision that found an SBA 8(a) program termination decision to be based on “numerous erroneous assumptions” and “unsupported conclusions, not substantial evidence.”