A government agency was liable for damaging leased space, even though the lease didn’t contain an explicit clause requiring the government to repair the space.
In a recent decision, the Civilian Board of Contract Appeals held that the VA was required to compensate the landlord for damage to the space, because every lease–including those entered by government tenants–contains an implied provision requiring the tenant not to damage the leased space, except for ordinary wear and tear.
A contractor was awarded more than $31,000 in attorneys’ fees and costs after a government agency unjustifiably refused to pay the contractor’s $6,000 claim–forcing the contractor to go through lengthy legal processes to get reimbursed.
A recent decision of the Civilian Board of Contract Appeals is a cautionary tale for government contracting officials, a few of whom seem inclined to play hardball with low-dollar claims, even when those claims are entirely justified.
The Service Contract Act requires contractors to pay certain provide no less than certain prevailing wages and fringe benefits (including vacation) to its service employees. The amount of vacation ordinarily is based on an employee’s years of service—and service with a predecessor contractor counts. The FAR’s Nondisplacement of Qualified Workers provision, in turn, requires follow-on contractors to offer a “right of first refusal” to many of those same incumbent employees.
A follow-on contractor is to be given a list of incumbent service personnel, but that information ordinarily isn’t available at the proposal stage. So what happens when a follow-on contractor unknowingly underbids because it isn’t aware how much vacation is owed to incumbent service personnel? The answer, at least in a fixed-price contract, is “too bad for the contractor.”
So it was in SecTek, Inc., CBCA 5036 (May 3, 2017)—there, the Civilian Board of Contract appeals held that a contractor must pay employees retained from the incumbent nearly $170,000 in wage and benefit costs based on its underestimate of those costs in its proposal.
It’s a well-known aspect of federal contracting: if a contractor wishes to formally dispute a matter of contract performance, the contractor should file a claim with the contracting officer.
But if the contractor is working under a task or delivery order, which contracting officer should be on the receiving end of that claim—the one responsible for the order, or the one responsible for the underlying contract?
As a recent Civilian Board of Contract Appeals decision demonstrates, when a contractor is performing work under a Federal Supply Schedule order, a claim involving the terms of the underlying Schedule contract must be filed with the GSA contracting officer.
When issues arise in performance of a federal contract, a contractor may seek redress from the government by filing a claim with the contracting officer. However, commencing such a claim may result in an exercise of patience and waiting by the contractor.
The Contract Disputes Act, as a jurisdictional hurdle for claims over $100,000, requires a contractor to submit a “certified claim” to the agency. The CDA also requires the contracting officer, within sixty days of receipt of a certified claim, to issue a decision on that claim or notify the contractor of the time within which the decision will be issued.
That second part of the equation can lead to some frustration on the part of contractors. As seen in a recent Civilian Board of Contract Appeals decision, a contracting officer may, in an appropriate case, extend the ordinary 60-day time frame by several months.
Picture this scenario: the government hires your company to do a job; you assign one of your best employees to lead the effort. He or she does such a good job that the government hires your employee away. The government then drags its feet on approving your proposed replacement and refuses to pay you for the time when the position was not staffed–even though the contract was fixed-price.
The scenario is exactly what happened to a company called Financial & Realty Services (FRS), and according to the Civilian Board of Contract Appeals, FRS wasn’t entitled to its entire fixed-price contract amount.
An SDVOSB set-aside contract was void–and unenforceable against the government–because the prime contractor had entered into an illegal “pass-through” arrangement with a non-SDVOSB subcontractor.
In a recent decision, the Civilian Board of Contract Appeals held that a SDVOSB set-aside contract obtained by misrepresenting the concern’s SDVOSB status was invalid from its inception; therefore, the prime contractor had no recourse against the government when the contract was later terminated for default.