GAO bid protest decisions, commentary on GAO bid protest regulations, and related topics.
You might think that if you send an email with the delivery receipt option and the delivery receipt comes back, the email was delivered. But when an offeror submits a proposal by email, does a delivery receipt mean that the agency necessarily received the proposal in its inbox?
At least under the facts of one recent GAO bid protest, the answer was “no.” In that case, the GAO held that an email delivery receipt wasn’t sufficient to demonstrate that the agency received the electronic proposal.
I was grocery shopping the other day, and I had to make the tough choice between the name-brand cereal and the store-brand cereal. I don’t know about you, but with some products, the name brand has a certain flavor that the store brand just can’t replicate. When it comes to government contracts, the same is true–sometimes the government wants a certain brand or supplier and will accept no substitutes.
GAO recently held that, where an agency required quotations including parts from one approved source of supply, and an offer is submitted that proposes an “alternate product,” the agency can reasonably reject the bid–and that a protest of the approved source restriction itself is untimely if it isn’t filed before the proposal deadline.
If you’re a winner under a solicitation, you can’t challenge the ground rules under which you won–at least under the facts of a recent GAO bid protest decision.
In that decision, GAO concluded that the protestor of a solicitation’s terms lacked standing when the protester was subsequently identified as an awardee under the solicitation.
When an agency takes corrective action in response to a bid protest, the agency voluntarily agrees to do something (such as re-evaluate proposals, re-open discussions, or even cancel a solicitation) to address the alleged problems identified in the protest. Corrective actions are quite common: in FY 2016, more than 23% of GAO bid protests resulted in corrective actions.
But what happens when a protester doesn’t like the scope of the agency’s proposed corrective action? As a recent GAO decision demonstrates, corrective actions can themselves be protested–but challenging an agency’s corrective action can be an uphill battle.
An agency’s oral advice, given at a pre-proposal conference, did not amend the solicitation or legally bind the agency.
In a recent bid protest decision, the GAO reiterated that offerors rely on oral advice from agencies at their own risk–particularly when the oral advice in question appears to contradict the plain language of the solicitation.
In a GAO bid protest, recovering costs after an agency takes corrective action turns on whether or not the agency unduly delayed the corrective action.
A recent GAO case shows that, in certain circumstances, an agency may be able to fight a protester almost to the bitter end, then take corrective action without necessarily having crossed the “unduly delayed” line.
A non-SDVOSB company couldn’t protest the terms of a VA SDVOSB set-aside solicitation, despite entering into a joint venture agreement with an SDVOSB–because the joint venture hadn’t started the process of becoming verified by the VA.
In a recent bid protest decision, GAO held that because neither the protester nor the joint venture was included in the VIP database, or likely to be included during the protest process, the protester wasn’t an “interested party” under the GAO’s bid protest regulations.