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.
What goes around, comes around.
The government sometimes refuses to pay a contractor for a modification when the government official requesting the modification lacks appropriate authority. But contractual authority isn’t a one-way street benefiting only the government. A recent decision by the Armed Services Board of Contract Appeals demonstrates that a contractor may not be bound by a final waiver and release of claims if the individual signing on the contractor’s behalf lacked authority.
A communication to a contracting officer taking issue with an awardee’s size can be treated as a size protest–even if the offeror making the communication didn’t intend to file a size protest.
That’s what happened in Sea Box, Inc., SBA No. SIZ-5846 (Aug. 7, 2017), when an offeror accidentally initiated a size protest after losing an award. Continue reading…
Sometimes you may find yourself running late. It happens to the best of us for a multitude of reasons. But what happens to federal contractors when they are running late in performing under a contract and there is “no reasonable likelihood” of timely performance?
Unfortunately for contractors in this position, as illustrated by a recent Civilian Board of Contract Appeals (CBCA) decision, the result may be a default termination.
I am pleased to announce that Shane McCall has joined our team of government contracts attorney-authors here at SmallGovCon. Shane is an associate attorney with Koprince Law LLC, where his practice focuses on federal government contracts law.
Before joining our team, Shane was an attorney with Lentz Clark Deines PA, where he advised individuals and small businesses alike on complex legal matters. Check out Shane’s full biography to learn more about our newest author, and don’t miss his first SmallGovCon post on how “fair and reasonable pricing” is evaluated under solicitations requiring line-item prices.
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.
Football season is back, and the Chiefs certainly gave those in our neck of the woods something to cheer for last night. I wish I could say I felt sorry for our SmallGovCon Patriots fans, but those five Super Bowl Rings ought to take the sting out of an opening-week loss.
I’ll be watching my share of football on Sunday, but before the weekend starts, it’s time for the SmallGovCon Week In Review. In this edition, two Arkansas men are headed to trial on procurement fraud charges, GSA awarded a $700 billion contract, a company vying for a piece of the border wall contract was previously investigated for alleged mentor-protege improprieties, and much more.