Past performance is an important part of the agency evaluation process—we’ve written about it many times before for a reason. Like other evaluation areas, agencies get a great deal of discretion in evaluating past performance. Perhaps a contractor thinks it has a good past performance record and wants the agency to consider it; perhaps the contractor doesn’t want the agency to ignore a poor past performance record of a competitor. How can a contractor tell when the agency made a reasonable decision not to consider some aspect of past performance? A recent COFC decision showed that the agency cannot ignore adverse past performance in some cases. COFC applied the “too close at hand” doctrine—which says agencies may be obligated to consider information it has during an evaluation, even if the offeror didn’t cite to it. Whether or not an agency’s failure to consider particular information is a violation of this rule or not is a fact-specific inquiry.