Category Archives: GAO Bid Protests

GAO bid protest decisions, commentary on GAO bid protest regulations, and related topics.

Failure to Timely File Comments Leads to Dismissed Protest

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When my nephew started kindergarten, his vocabulary expanded to include a new phrase: “Rules are rules, and you have to follow the rules!” For my nephew (who, if I’m being honest, can be a bit mischievous), this newfound respect for following rules was adorable.

Government contractors should commit this lesson to heart: you have to follow the rules! As one government contractor recently learned, this includes GAO’s bid protest filing rules. Where a protester doesn’t follow the rules, its protest is likely to be dismissed.

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Contractor’s Email Leads to Lost Contract, Denied Protest

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Generally speaking, government contractors know that part of the cost of doing business with the federal government is some loss of autonomy. The government writes the rules. It is the 500 lb. gorilla. What it says usually goes.

When contractors try to do things their own way–even in an relatively informal medium such as email–they can sometimes get into trouble, as evidenced by a recent GAO protest decision: Bluehorse Corp., B-414809 (Aug. 18, 2017).

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Reminder: No Ostensible Subcontractor Protests At GAO

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The GAO lacks jurisdiction to consider a challenge to a contract awardee’s size status, including questions of whether the awardee is affiliated with its subcontractor under the ostensible subcontractor rule.

In a recent bid protest decision, the GAO confirmed that it will not adjudicate an allegation of ostensible subcontractor affiliation.

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Agency Insists On Subcontract With OEM; GAO Agrees

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Subcontracting is a way of life for many federal government contractors; however, the identification and selection of such subcontractors is usually left up to the reasonable discretion of the prime contractor. So what happens when a solicitation prescribes that a particular subcontractor be retained, but that subcontractor won’t assist in bid preparation efforts?

Well, in one recent case, the prospective prime contractor was out of luck.

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Price Realism: Agency Didn’t Compare Proposed Rates To Incumbent Rates

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An incumbent contractor won a protest at GAO recently where it argued that the awardee’s labor rates were too low, because they were lower than the rates the incumbent itself was paying the same people.

GAO faulted the agency for concluding that the awardee’s price was realistic without checking the proposed rates against the incumbent rates. In other words, GAO told the agency to start at the obvious place—the compensation of the current employees.

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Unequal Evaluation: Incumbent Not Credited For Retaining Its Own Employees

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In its evaluation of proposals, a procuring agency gave a challenger a strength for proposing to recruit incumbent employees, but didn’t give the incumbent contractor a strength–even though the incumbent contractor proposed to retain the very same people.

Unsurprisingly, the GAO found that the evaluation was unequal, and sustained the incumbent’s protest.

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Past Performance: Does Duration Matter?

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Past performance evaluations normally consider two aspects of an offeror’s prior work: whether that performance was recent and relevant. But in making its best value determination, must an agency also consider the duration of an offeror’s past performance?

A recent GAO bid protest decision answered this question, at least under the rules established in the solicitation at hand. In Technica LLC, B-413546.4 et al. (July 10, 2017), GAO denied a protest challenging the sufficiency of an awardee’s past performance even though the awardee’s past performance was much shorter than the protester’s.

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