The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a case Monday that could have upended the Rule of Two’s priority over the AbilityOne program for U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ procurements.
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Novation Disaster: SBIR Phase III Award Stripped by GAO
Contractors interested in acquiring participants in the SBA’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program beware: successfully novating SBIR contracts has been made significantly harder by a recent GAO decision.
Worse still, SBIR novation mistakes can jeopardize future awards under the SBIR contract vehicles. Tread lightly.
Continue readingOHA Reiterates that Filing Deadlines Cannot be Extended
As I’m sure most other attorneys can commiserate with, I often have a recurring nightmare that I miss a filing deadline. Doing so can lead to terrible results: dismissed cases and, in some cases, sanctions against the attorney. For this reason, we always check, double-check, and triple-check our filing deadlines, and strive to file documents early, when possible.
Given my fear, I gain no pleasure in reading about missed filing deadlines, especially when the goof is the subject of a matter outside the attorney’s control.
But as a recent decision by the SBA’s Office of Hearings and Appeals demonstrates, even the most sympathetic of excuses won’t excuse a late appeal filing.
Continue readingEmail Isn’t Instant: GAO Dismisses Case Where Proposal was Four Minutes Late
By 2020, most of us have gotten used to almost immediate means of digital communication. We expect emails to reach their destination at lightning-fast speeds—but this isn’t always the case.
Relying on this expectation can have devastating effects, as it did for a protester in one recent GAO case.
Continue readingGAO: Proposal Evaluations Can’t Take Place in La La Land
Wouldn’t it be swell to simply erase those less-than-flattering moments from your past merely by deleting them? For instance, what if your biographer simply omitted any mention of you being excited for and seeing the apparently horrible new Cats movie?
Does erasing a historical fact–such as an unfavorable detail from a proposal–mean that it never happened?
Continue readingAgency Should Have Investigated Proposal Contradictions, Says GAO
Preparing a proposal for a federal procurement is an involved process. On top of the extensive drafting and estimating work, proposals often require supporting documentation like licenses or certifications. But what happens when a proposal and its supporting documentation contradict one another?
As one contractor learned the hard way, this contradiction can have disastrous consequences.
Continue readingSBA’s Receipts Calculation Transition Period: Is It Legal?
When the SBA issued its final rule implementing the Runway Extension Act’s 5-year receipts calculation period earlier this month, it allowed for a two-year transition: until January 6, 2022, the SBA will allow businesses to choose either a 3-year or a 5-year receipts calculation period.
This transition phase is helpful, the SBA noted, to small businesses that might be adversely affected by an abrupt change to the receipts calculation period—namely, businesses with declining revenues over the preceding five years that are nonetheless close to the applicable size standard cap.
SBA’s accommodation of these companies is, by any measure, a commonsense solution to prevent inadvertent harm caused by the Runway Extension Act. But notwithstanding this laudable policy objective, is the new transition period legal?
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