The Federal Aviation Administration is exempt from the Small Business Act and the SBA’s size regulations, but this does not mean that the SBA’s ostensible subcontractor affiliation rule does not apply in FAA procurements.
In a recent decision, the FAA’s Office of Dispute Resolution for Acquisition applied the ostensible subcontractor rule–and SBA Office of Hearings and Appeals decisions interpreting that rule–in arriving at the conclusion that a contract awardee was an eligible small business.
If you are planning to defraud the U.S. Government (and I certainly hope that you are not), your best bet is to avoid the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Disadvantaged Business Entity program.
Yesterday, the Department of Justice announced that a DOT DBE subcontractor had agreed to settle “pass-through” fraud claims for $936,000. The DOJ’s announcement comes on the heels of a June 6 press release touting a settlement of nearly $3 million, also stemming from alleged DOT DBE fraud.
A prospective contractor was kicked out of a competition for submitting its pricing in PDF format, instead of in Microsoft Excel files, as called for in the solicitation.
In a bid protest filed by the excluded offeror, the GAO held that the procuring agency properly deemed the offeror unacceptable for failing to use Excel.
Somewhere, Bill Gates is smiling.
A company’s blanket purchase agreement with the U.S. Forest Service was not a “contract,” meaning that the company had no ability to file a complaint with the U.S. Court of Federal Claims for an alleged improper termination of the BPA.
In dismissing the complaint on technical grounds, the Court’s message to the terminated company was, in essence, “tough luck.”
When designating the NAICS code for a solicitation, the procuring agency should not consider which NAICS code will help increase competition and decrease the risks of unsuccessful performance.
According to a recent decision of the SBA Office of Hearings and Appeals, these factors should play no bearing on an agency’s NAICS code designation. Instead, in most cases, the agency must select the NAICS code that best describes the principal purpose of the product or service being acquired.
A Contracting Officer must designate the NAICS code which best describes the principal purpose of the product or service being acquired, right?
Not always. As demonstrated in a recent SBA Office of Hearings and Appeals decision, when it comes to picking a NAICS code for a GSA Schedule task order, a Contracting Officer’s choices can be quite limited–and the “best” NAICS code might not be chosen.
In a recent case, a federal court held that a procuring agency properly downgraded an offeror’s proposal because the proposal was ambiguous as to how much of the contract work the offeror intended to subcontract.
According to the Court, even though the amount to be subcontracted was small in any event, the ambiguity meant that the procuring agency reasonably questioned whether the offeror understood the requirements of the solicitation.