The SBA Proposes New Rules to Help Small Businesses in Obtaining Past Performance

The SBA proposes to amend its regulations to implement new provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal year 2021 that provides small business contractors with new tools to establish past performance when bidding on prime contracts for Government procurements. The proposed rules would add two new methods for small businesses to obtain qualifying past performance. One proposed rule would allow a small business with no relevant past performance of its own to use the past performance of a joint venture in which it took part. The second proposed rule would require prime contractors to provide, to small businesses that served as a first-tier subcontractor, a record of the business’s past performance for use by the small business in future proposals.

The proposed rules are here.

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Picking Your Team: Joint Ventures Versus Prime/Subcontractor Teams (Part Two, Past Performance)

Federal contractors often ask: “Is it better to team up for government work with a prime-sub arrangement or with a joint venture?” Well, (spoiler alert) the answer is: it depends. But I won’t leave you with just that. This three-part series will provide insight on some of the major differences between these two types of “teams” that offerors should consider when making the decision between a joint venture or prime/subcontractor team in competing for and performing federal contracts. While this series will not provide a comprehensive list of all the differences between these two types of teams, it will cover some of the big ones that seem to come up more frequently in this decision-making process. The focus of the first article in this three-part series was work share considerations. This second article will focus on evaluations of a team’s past performance.

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Polaris GWAC: GSA Issues Draft RFP Sections

GSA has been hard at work on the Polaris solicitation. The goal: provide federal agencies with information technology services from qualified small businesses. GSA recently released the updated draft versions of the submission instructions and evaluation criteria for Polaris. Like CIO-SP4, which we blogged on in detail, Polaris is going to be of interest to many small business IT contractors. So, here are a few highlights from the draft sections.

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CIO-SP4 Amendment 9, a Last Minute Stay

With less than 24 hours left until proposals were due, NIH released Amendment 9, staying the proposal deadline until August 20, 2021 at Noon Eastern. Amendment 9 says it changes very little, but the innocuous cover letter belies a major change to evaluations for Other Than Small and Emerging Large Businesses (OTSBs and ELBs).

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CIO-SP4: Large Mentors Now Get More Credit

I wrote earlier about the restriction on the number of experience examples a large business mentor can provide. Well, NITAAC has listened! OK, they probably weren’t listening directly to me, but let me have this one, alright. CIO-SP4 has been amended to allow large business mentors to contribute two examples of corporate experience per task area.

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CIO-SP4: Is it Limiting Mentor Experience Too Much?

The CIO-SP4 is a big deal for many small and large federal contractors. And lately it’s been a bit of a moving target as to how NITAAC will evaluate the experience of companies working together in prime-sub, mentor-protégé, and joint-venture relationships. We wrote about some of the issues with past performance and other recent changes. One change that caught my eye puts a restriction on the number of experience examples a large business mentor can provide. But should it?

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