8(a) joint ventures are not 8(a) program participants, according to a recent (and commonsense) decision of the SBA Office of Hearings and Appeals.
In its decision, SBA rejected a joint venture’s argument that its 8(a) joint venture agreement was essentially an 8(a) program application, drawing a jurisdictional decision between 8(a) program certification and 8(a) joint venture agreement approval.
GAO bid protests sometimes involve allegations that a particular contracting officer and/or other government personnel were biased against the protester.
However, as a recent GAO bid protest decision demonstrates, without “convincing proof,” which can be very difficult to obtain, the GAO will not sustain a protest allegation of bias or bad faith on the part of government employees. In other words, without a “smoking gun,” making an allegation of bias or bad faith may simply be a waste of time.
In discussions, a procuring agency is not required to inform a prospective contractor that its costs are higher than those of its competitors, unless those costs are so high as to be unreasonable.
This important potential limitation on the scope of discussions was at issue in a recent GAO bid protest decision, in which the GAO held that an agency had not erred by failing to inform an offeror that its proposed costs were approximately $3 million higher than the awardee’s.
The SBA’s “successor-in-interest” affiliation rule provides that a government contractor can be affiliated with a dissolved or liquidated company, but only if the government contractor acquires “all, or nearly all” of the dissolved company’s assets and liabilities.
According to a recent commonsense decision of the SBA Office of Hearings and Appeals, the successor-in-interest affiliation rule does not apply when a government contractor acquires only some of the dissolved company’s assets and liabilities.
An agency may amend a solicitation after the deadline for receiving offers, so long as the amendment is not “so substantial as to exceed what prospective offerors reasonably could have anticipated” in submitting offers under the original solicitation.
This rule, which is codified at FAR 15.206(e), was at issue in a recent GAO bid protest decision, in which the GAO held that the amendment merely clarified the original solicitation and thus did not require cancellation.
Small government construction contractors often have difficulty obtaining required bonding–which sometimes causes them to turn to their subcontractors for bonding assistance.
But what if a subcontractor cannot (or will not) provide the necessary bonding assistance? According to a recent federal grand jury indictment, one California man took advantage of these situations by offering fraudulent bonds–at higher premiums–to government contractors. The man now faces the possibility of more than 30 years in prison.
“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts,” said the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
In a recently published bid protest decision, the GAO held that a procuring agency was not entitled to its own facts when it came to the contents of the protester’s proposal. Because the proposal contained the very items the agency claimed were missing, the GAO sustained the protest.