In the procurement process, agencies are afforded a significant amount of discretion when selecting an awardee. When an agency’s decision is protested, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) focuses primarily on the reasonableness of the agency’s conclusions. But when an agency fails to show its rationale behind a decision, GAO is unable to conclude that the agency’s decision was reasonable.
In a recent GAO decision, Castro & Company, B-423689 (Comp. Gen. Nov. 13, 2025), GAO sustained a protest on three grounds, all of which involved an agency’s lack of documentation.
The Federal Election Commission’s (Agency) issued a Blanket Purchase Agreement (BPA) for financial management and accounting support services under Solicitation No. 9531BP25Q0010 (Solicitation). The Solicitation stated the award would be on a best-value tradeoff basis, considering three factors: (1) technical approach; (2) price; and (3) past performance.
Castro & Company, LLC (Protester) was one of the seven offerors and received a “Marginal” rating in technical approach but offered the lowest price of all seven quotations. After conducting a tradeoff analysis, the Agency determined that Contracts Management Enterprises, LLC (Awardee) represented the best value to the government, despite Protester offering the lowest price.
Following the award, Protester filed this protest on three grounds: apparent organizational conflict of interest (OCI), unreasonable technical evaluation, and inadequate best-value tradeoff decision.
Impaired Objectivity OCI
Protester alleged that the Agency failed to meaningfully consider Awardee’s unmitigated impaired objectivity OCI.
Contracting officers are required to identify and evaluate OCIs as early as possible, and to avoid, neutralize, or mitigate significant potential conflicts to prevent an unfair competitive advantage or the existence of conflicting roles that might impair a contractor’s objectivity. FAR 9.504(a). An impaired objectivity OCI arises where a firm’s ability to render impartial advice to the government would be undermined by the firm’s competing interests.
The Awardee was performing under a separate task order, providing acquisition support to the Agency. As part of the task order, the Awardee’s employees served as contract specialists, working directly with the Agency’s procurement officials – including the contracting officer serving as the source selection authority for this BPA. We suspect the protester must have known about the work of the awardee based on personal knowledge of the setup.
The Awardee simultaneously provided support to the Agency on procurement matters, while simultaneously competing for the contract to be awarded.
Thus, Protester asserted that this proximity created the appearance of an impaired objectivity OCI.
In response, the Agency noted that the contracting officer had acknowledged that the Awardee’s support “may create a conflict of interest or the appearance of a conflict of interest.” The contracting officer noted that she took steps to mitigate this by: (1) creating a “firewall” to ensure that the CME contractor was “not involved in this procurement and had no access to proprietary or source selection information”; (2) directing all quotation materials to be sent and secured only in the contracting officer’s own email account to create a “data silo”; and (3) ensuring that no solicitation materials were uploaded to any shared drives before award.
GAO ultimately found that the contracting officer had failed to sufficiently investigate, consider, or mitigate the impaired objectivity OCI, noting instead,
[T]he entirety of the agency’s record of its OCI analysis consists of the contracting officer’s bare statement that she “considered whether prior contracts with CME created a conflict of interest” and “determined that CME’s prior contract with FEC may create a conflict of interest or the appearance of conflict of interest.” The agency offers no further explanation, however, about what the contracting officer considered in her analysis (e.g., SOWs for the instant BPA and for CME’s acquisition support task order), what factors formed the basis of her OCI determination, or how it even related to the alleged impaired objectivity OCI.
Technical Approach Evaluation
Protester alleged that the Agency failed to evaluate the company’s technical approach in accordance with the Solicitation’s terms, applying unstated evaluation criteria instead.
For technical approach, the Solicitation required offerors to “address all aspects of the technical requirements” and to “provide sufficient detail to enable the Government to thoroughly evaluate the [o]fferor’s ability to satisfy the requirement specified” in the SOW.” Protester’s technical approach was “Marginal,” based on the Agency’s findings of one strength, one weakness, and two deficiencies. The Agency provided only the following statement for its reasoning behind the “Marginal” rating:
The [quotation] fails to provide the specific details, including timeline details, and lacks a structured response that aligns with the task outlined in the [SOW] section 3.0 requirements, which made it difficult to verify full compliance. Key personnel are lacking some important key skills as identified above.
There was no further explanation for the weakness, nor did the Agency point to specific details that were missing from Protester’s quotation.
Protester argued that the Solicitation did not include any requirements for timelines. While the Solicitation did list “timeliness” as part of the vendor’s technical approach, the Solicitation never mentioned specific “timelines.” Protester noted that the Agency failed to offer any explanation for the finding of a lack of timeline details.
GAO has held that “an agency that fails to adequately document its evaluation of quotations bears the risk that its determinations will be considered unsupported, and absent such support, our Office may be unable to determine whether the agency had a reasonable basis for its determinations.”
Here, GAO concluded that the Agency’s evaluation was conclusory and failed to identify any substantive support for its findings. The Agency could not demonstrate a direct tie between the “Marginal” rating and specific solicitation requirements, nor was the Agency able to explain how Protester’s quote failed to meet these requirements.
Best-Value Tradeoff Analysis
Protester’s final assertion was that the Agency’s tradeoff decision was unreasonable because it was based on a flawed and undocumented evaluation. Even though the contracting officer claimed that a “trade-off analysis was performed among all offerors considered for award,” the documented trade-off decision demonstrated that the analysis was only conducted among three highly rated quotations, which notably did not include Protester’s.
For a best-value procurement, “it is the function of the source selection authority to perform a tradeoff between price and non-price factors, that is, to determine whether one quotation’s superiority under the non-price factor is worth a higher price.”
Even when a solicitation states that price is of less importance than the non-price factors, an agency is still required to meaningfully consider the cost or price to the government when making the selection. If the Agency selects the higher-priced offer with a rating technically superior to a lower-priced acceptable offer, then the Agency is required to provide a rational explanation that supports its decision for selecting a higher-rated offer that warrants a higher payment.
Here, GAO concluded that because the Agency’s tradeoff excluded Protester’s technically acceptable and lower-priced quotation without any explanation, the tradeoff decision was unreasonable and inadequately documented.
There’s a valuable lesson that contractors can take away from this case. When an agency fails to show its work, GAO cannot adequately decide that the agency’s evaluation was conducted reasonably. Here, GAO never made any conclusions regarding the qualifications of the Awardee, or whether Protester should have received the award. GAO sustained the protest on grounds of the Agency’s inadequate documentation.
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