GAO bid protest decisions, commentary on GAO bid protest regulations, and related topics.
An agency’s decision to award a contract as an 8(a) sole source is a “business decision” for which the agency has broad discretion–and a potential protester challenging the agency’s use of that discretion will have an uphill battle.
In a recent bid protest decision, the GAO confirmed that government officials are presumed to act in good faith, and that the presumption extends to the decision to award an 8(a) sole source contract instead of competing the work in question.
Debriefings play a vital role in the procurement process. When conducted fully and fairly, a debriefing provides an offeror with valuable insight into the strengths and shortcomings of its proposal, thus enabling the offeror to improve its offering under future solicitations. But when an agency provides only a perfunctory debriefing, the process can be virtually worthless–and may actually encourage an unsuccessful offeror to file a bid protest.
With this in mind, the Office of Federal Procurement Policy recently issued a memorandum that urges agencies to strengthen the debriefing process. In doing so, OFPP has encouraged agencies to adopt a debriefing guide that will help facilitate effective and efficient debriefings.
An offeror’s proposal was properly rejected as late because the proposal exceeded the agency’s email file size limit.
In a recent bid protest decision highlighting the importance of not submitting electronic proposals at the last minute, the GAO held that a small business’s proposal was late because the emails transmitting the proposal exceeded 10 MB–even though the solicitation didn’t mention a file size limit.
An agency acted improperly by excluding an offeror from the competitive range simply because the offeror received a “neutral” past performance score.
In a recent bid protest decision, the GAO wrote that the FAR precludes evaluating an offeror unfavorably because of a “neutral” or “unknown” past performance rating–and that the prohibition on unfavorable treatment prevents an agency from excluding an offeror from the competitive range on the basis of a neutral rating.
GAO’s jurisdiction to hear protests of certain civilian task and delivery orders has been restored.
On December 15, 2016, the President signed the 2016 GAO Civilian Task and Delivery Order Protest Authority Act (the “ 2016 Act”) into law. The 2016 Act restores GAO’s recently-expired jurisdiction to hear protests of civilian task and delivery orders valued in excess of $10 million.
The GAO sustained 22.56% of protests decided on the merits in Fiscal Year 2016–nearly double the 12% sustain rate reported in FY 2015.
According to the GAO’s FY 2016 Bid Protest Annual Report, the GAO sustained 139 of the 616 protests decided on the merits (that is, cases where GAO actually reached a “sustain” or “deny” decision). The overall effectiveness rate for protesters–a combination of “sustain” decisions, plus the many cases in which agencies took corrective action in response to protests–was 46%, a slight increase over the prior fiscal year.
The 2017 National Defense Authorization Act restores the GAO’s recently-expired jurisdiction to hear protests of civilian task and delivery orders valued in excess of $10 million.
The 2017 NDAA also continues to allow the GAO to hear protests of DoD task and delivery orders–but raises the jurisdictional threshold to $25 million.