In a victory for common sense, the GAO has held that a proposal that was in the agency’s possession before the due date was not “late,” even though the offeror emailed the proposal to the agency instead of submitting it through an online portal.
The agency’s attempt to reject the proposal was particularly egregious because the agency told the protester that the proposal could be submitted by email–then rejected the proposal when the protester did just that.
How many times have you forgotten to include an attachment in an email? For many of us, it is not an uncommon occurrence.
In the case of one unfortunate contractor, a forgotten email attachment led to the rejection of its proposal–and the GAO upheld the agency’s decision.
The GSA e-Buy website may have improperly failed to preserve critical solicitation records, according to the U.S. Court of Federal Claims.
In Laboratory Corp. of America v. United States, No. 12-622C (2012), the court has asked the government to explain why it should not face sanctions for so-called “spoliation” of evidence, arising from the inability to access archived e-Buy materials. The court also suggested that the procuring agency might have used e-Buy to improperly attempt to modify a solicitation without issuing a formal amendment.
Our firm experienced a strange email outage yesterday: I could receive incoming email messages through my Outlook account, but anything I tried to send bounced back. After several bounce backs, I began emailing clients and other contacts from a gmail account (if you were on the receiving end, my apologies for the temporary lack of a professional email address, but it’s better than ignoring you, right?)
All this is to say that I can sympathize with McKesson Technologies, which experienced technical difficulties (as well as an unfortunate spelling problem) when trying to submit a proposal by email. Although the agency awarded McKesson the contract anyway, a competitor filed a GAO bid protest, and that was the end of McKesson’s award.