Tag Archives: GAO bid protests

Bottom-Line Price, Not Line-Item Price, Is Key for Price Reasonableness

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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.

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Agency Insists On Subcontract With OEM; GAO Agrees

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Subcontracting is a way of life for many federal government contractors; however, the identification and selection of such subcontractors is usually left up to the reasonable discretion of the prime contractor. So what happens when a solicitation prescribes that a particular subcontractor be retained, but that subcontractor won’t assist in bid preparation efforts?

Well, in one recent case, the prospective prime contractor was out of luck.

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5 Things You Should Know: Bid Protests

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You’ve poured precious time and resources into a proposal, only to lose out on the award. Making matters worse, the agency’s explanation of the award shows that it didn’t reasonably evaluate your proposal. What can you do?

Here are five things you should know about bid protests.

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Senate 2018 NDAA Re-Introduces Flawed GAO Bid Protest “Reforms”

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Last year, during consideration of the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act, the Senate proposed to “reform” the GAO bid protest process by forcing some unsuccessful protesters to pay the government’s costs, and (more controversially) by denying incumbent protesters profits on bridge contracts and extensions.

Congress ultimately chose not to implement these measures.  Instead, Congress called for an independent report on the effect of bid protests at DoD–a wise move, considering that major reforms to the protest process shouldn’t be undertaken without first seeing whether hard data shows that protests are harming the procurement process.

But now, six months before that report is due, the Senate has re-introduced its flawed bid protest proposals as part of the 2018 NDAA.

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SmallGovCon Week In Review: March 20-24, 2017

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The mantra of March Madness is “survive and advance,” but the Kansas Jayhawks did more than that in their 32-point win over Purdue last night. Here in Lawrence, we’re waiting for tomorrow night’s Elite Eight showdown with Oregon. And since waiting is always better with some good reading material, it’s time for the SmallGovCon Week In Review.

In this week’s edition, a look at how President Trump’s proposed military budget will impact customers, a contractor agrees to a whopping $45 million payout to settle allegations of overcharging the government, the Army contends that protests are “nearly automatic,” and much more.

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GAO: Failure To Explain Prejudice Doomed Otherwise Successful Protest

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Imagine that you’re a manufacturer of appliances, and respond to a solicitation seeking one of your appliances (on a brand name basis). You, of course, propose to provide your appliance. But you lose out on an award to an offeror that submits an offer for a different appliance that admittedly does not comply with the solicitation’s minimum requirements.

In this situation, you’d probably be fairly upset. And as a recent GAO decision acknowledged, you’d likely have a successful basis of protest—that is, if you could establish that you were prejudiced by the government’s award decision, and if you understood what exactly the GAO means by “prejudice.”

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GAO Reaffirms Agencies’ Broad Discretion to (Not) Consider Price Realism for Fixed-Price Contracts

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We are quickly approaching our 1000th blog post on the SmallGovCon blog. To celebrate we want to reward one lucky reader with a free one hour custom webinar for up to 50 people presented by Steven Koprince on the government contracting topic of your choice! You can enter by using the hashtag #SGC1000 on Twitter or Facebook just by telling us why you read the blog or what you love most about. You can also simply fill out this form to be entered. Good Luck!

As a general rule, an agency is only required to evaluate a fixed-price offer for reasonableness (that is, whether the price is too high). Agencies are not required to evaluate fixed-price offers for realism (that is, whether the price is too low) and, in fact, cannot do so unless the solicitation advises offerors that a realism evaluation will be conducted.

GAO recently reaffirmed this principle when it denied a protest challenging an agency’s refusal to consider the realism of offerors’ fixed prices as part of a corrective action, even though the agency suspected that at least one offeror’s price was unrealistically low.

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