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.
“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.
The Government Printing Office is not required to refer non-responsibility determinations involving small businesses to the Small Business Administration under the Certificate of Competency program.
According to a recent GAO bid protest decision, the GPO’s status as a legislative entity exempts it from the Certificate of Competency process–much to the disappointment of the small business protester in question.
Price reasonableness and price realism are both benchmarks against which a procuring agency may evaluate an offeror’s price, but price reasonableness and price realism–though they are often confused for one another–are not the same thing.
As the GAO explained in a recent bid protest decision, one of the terms involves consideration of whether an offeror’s price is too low, whereas the other evaluates whether the price is too high. The distinction is particularly important for fixed-price procurements, in which the question of whether pricing is too low is not one the procuring agency is always required to ask.
In a recent bid protest decision, the GAO held that an agency did not fail to provide an offeror with meaningful discussions about an evaluated weakness in the offeror’s staffing approach because the aspect of the staffing plan deemed to be a weakness was introduced in the offeror’s final proposal revision, or FPR.
A Treasury Department solicitation did not require contractors to be certified HUBZone participants at the time the solicitation was issued, despite language in the solicitation arguably requiring just that in order to receive a high rating for socioeconomic status.
In a recent GAO bid protest decision, the GAO held that the agency properly interpreted the solicitation to require HUBZone certification at the time proposals were due, not the time the solicitation was issued. The GAO’s ruling comports with the HUBZone program regulations, which do not require contractors to be certified at the time a solicitation is issued in order to be considered HUBZone participants for purposes of that solicitation.
A contractor was awarded an “Excellent” past performance score despite submitting only three past performance references, not the five past performance references required by the solicitation.
Although one might think that a contractor would be penalized for failing to satisfy such a requirement, the GAO held that the procuring agency properly gave the contractor in question a high past performance score, based on the three submitted references and past performance information obtained from other sources.