GAO bid protest decisions, commentary on GAO bid protest regulations, and related topics.
Multiple-award task-order contracts are becoming an increasingly common feature of government contracting, and many carry very high ceiling values. This places participation in MATOC awards at a premium.
Unsurprisingly, base MATOC awards are being protested with some frequency before GAO. In a recent decision, GAO provided a unique solution for sustaining MATOC protests without causing substantial disruptions: simply adding the successful protester to the pool.
As those familiar with government contracts are undoubtedly aware, ensuring a bid protest is timely filed with GAO is a paramount consideration. GAO takes a particularly dim view of protests not filed in accordance with its timeliness regulations, which can encourage parties to file a protest as quickly as possible. As GAO recently explained, however, in the context of extended debriefings, there is such a thing as filing too soon.
When preparing a proposal for a Government solicitation, ensuring that your product or service meets all of the requirements specified by the Government’s solicitation is essential. Simple enough, right?
Not necessarily. One of the most frequent pitfalls in proposal preparation is assuming the Government understands your products and industry as well as you do, which may not be the case. A recent GAO bid protest demonstrates that a “well-written proposal” sometimes must include information that a contractor might expect the Government evaluation team ought to know.
When pursuing a bid protest before the Government Accountability Office, it is never a good idea to presume that you’ll get your attorneys’ fees paid by the agency.
If you are fortunate enough to recover attorneys’ fees, GAO’s general standard is to recommend paying the fees associated with all the protest grounds being pursued, whether or not they were meritorious. But although this is the general posture, it is not always the case.
The Air Force’s large NETCENTS-2 IDIQ vehicle did not require orders to be set-aside under the small business pool, except for orders valued between the micro-purchase threshold and simplified acquisition threshold.
In a recent decision, the GAO held that although the NETCENTS-2 contract in question says that Contracting Officers “should” perform a “rule of two” small business set-aside analysis for orders valued over the simplified acquisition threshold, it does not require that such an analysis be performed–meaning that Contracting Officers can validly award such orders to large businesses, even if two or more small business NETCENTS-2 holders exist.
In order to protest a procurement at GAO, the protester must be an “interested party.” An interested party is an “actual or prospective bidder or offeror whose direct economic interest would be affected by the award of the contract or by the failure to award the contract.”
But does the identity of the protester have to be the same as the offeror under the procurement? GAO recently offered some guidance on that question.
The Buy American Act generally requires construction contractors to use domestically-made materials, unless an exception applies. One important exception allows contractors to use foreign-produced materials when the cost of domestic material is six percent more expensive. To qualify under this exception, however, a contractor must provide certain information outlined by the FAR with its bid.
But what if a contractor doesn’t provide every piece of required information? Is its proposal automatically doomed as non-responsive? Not necessarily. A recent case shows that offerors may have some wiggle-room.