GAO bid protest decisions, commentary on GAO bid protest regulations, and related topics.
An agency isn’t required to cancel a small business set-aside solicitation if the agency learns that one of the small businesses upon whom the set-aside decision rested is no longer small.
In a recent bid protest decision, the GAO confirmed that an agency need not redo its “rule of two” determination when a potential small business competitor outgrows its size standard–even if it could effectively convert a particular solicitation into a “rule of one.”
Contracting officers have wide discretion to determine that a business can perform the work in question—even if the business is about to enter bankruptcy.
In a recent GAO protest, an unsuccessful offeror challenged just such a determination, saying that there is no way the awarded business could perform because it was nearly bankrupt. But according to the GAO, so long as the agency considered the pending bankruptcy, it was not improper to make an award.
When I went out for pizza with my family the other night, the only number that mattered to me when I got the check was the bottom-line price. It didn’t matter to me what the price for each pizza or each lemonade was, as long as the total price was within my budget.
For an agency evaluating a proposal for reasonableness in a fixed-price setting, the same holds true: it is the bottom-line price that matters, not the individual items that add up to the bottom-line price. The GAO recently had the opportunity to review this concept in a bid protest decision.
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.
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).
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.
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.