Happy Friday, Readers! As temperatures climb in this now official Kansas summer, so does federal government spending. But with more spending, comes more responsibility. A lot has happened this week! The FAR council proposed to ban TikTok for contractors. NASA is planning some extensive tech development, with the help of small businesses. And NOAA issued a massive $8 billion RFP for a scientific and professional services acquisition. Enjoy the articles below and your weekend!
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Uncle Sam only wants to do business with ethical contractors — and not all of the government’s ethics rules are intuitive. In this webinar, government contracts attorney, Nicole Pottroff, explains the ins and outs of the key ethics rules contractors should know, including organizational conflicts of interest, contingent fees, collusion, gratuities, the False Claims Act, and the Procurement Integrity Act. The presentation concludes with an in-depth look at what a compliant Ethics Plan and Internal Compliance Program should include. We hope you will join us. Registration link here.
In the world of Federal Government Contracting, it often feels like there are 20 different ways that your business or your business’s awards can be protested. In addition to size protests and bid protests (at both GAO and the COFC), there is also what is commonly referred to as a “status protest.” A status protest, while certainly less common than size protests and bid protests, still presents its own unique factors, procedures, and corresponding risks that contractors should be aware of. In this next installment of our Back to Basics series, we will walk you through a status protest and what impact a status protest may have on a federal contractor’s business.
Continue reading…GAO recently sustained a bid protest to a General Services Administration (GSA) acquisition for warehousing and deployment services at the strategic national stockpile–a literal “stockpile” of the nation’s largest supply of critical pharmaceuticals, medical equipment and supplies, and emergency supplies. GSA issued this solicitation and conducted this acquisition on behalf of the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR), an operating agency of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). But according to GAO, in evaluating offerors under its solicitation, here, GSA failed to provide offerors with the meaningful discussions required by the FAR. So, GAO sustained the protest and recommended that GSA: reopen the procurement to conduct meaningful discussions with offerors, accept and evaluate revised proposals after doing so, and make a new award decision on that basis.
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Happy Friday! We hope you had a great week and can take time to enjoy your weekend. We’ve been receiving a lot of rain here in the Midwest lately. The rain gauge was completely full and topped out at 4 1/2″ in a 12 hour span of time, this past week. Everything outside is looking beautiful and I’m guessing there will be a lot of lawn mowing going on this weekend.
We’ve included several articles that hopefully provide some good information concerning federal government contracting this week. Enjoy your weekend!
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For small businesses and their teammates, few topics in government contracting are as confusing as the limitations on subcontracting for set-aside and socioeconomic sole source contracts. And if that isn’t stressful enough, the “LoS” is an area of heavy enforcement: get it wrong, and a contractor can face major penalties. The nonmanufacturer rule is another commonly misunderstood rule in the federal government contracting realm–but also, one we encounter quite often in our role assisting federal contractors.
In this course, government contracts attorneys, Nicole Pottroff & Stephanie Ellis, from Koprince McCall Pottroff LLC, will help you make sense of the limitations on subcontracting and nonmanufacturer rule. Using a step-by-step process and plenty of examples to bring these rules to life will help you ensure both understanding and compliance. Hope you will join us! Registration link here.
A couple of weeks ago, I explored the Court of Federal Claims case of SH Synergy, LLC v. United States. In that blog, linked below, I looked at the first question raised in the protest that centered on the question of whether a mentor with two approved mentor protégé joint ventures with two different protégés under the SBA’s Mentor-Protégé Program is restricted from placing competing offers for a solicitation, in this case GSA’s Polaris solicitation. The answer to that was yes, they are restricted pursuant to 13 C.F.R. § 125.9. Because this decision was chocked full of useful information, and as promised, I’m back to look at the second issue tackled in this mammoth COFC opinion: did the solicitation’s terms, which required mentor-protégé joint ventures, woman-owned small business joint ventures, and service-disabled veteran owned small business joint ventures to be evaluated in the same manner as offerors, generally, violate procurement regulations? As you will see, the answer to that question is also yes, and it appears that this decision has already had an impact on other procurements.
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