An unsuccessful offeror’s email to the Contracting Officer, in which the offeror expressed “concerns” about the awardee’s small business size status, was too vague to constitute an SBA size protest.
According to a recent decision of the SBA Office of Hearings and Appeals, a viable size protest must be explicit enough to alert the Contracting Officer that the offeror is protesting the awardee’s size.
A SBA size protest must contain some basis for the belief that the company being protested is not an eligible small business.
As demonstrated in a recent decision of the SBA Office of Hearings and Appeals, a protester’s “bare allegation” that the protested firm does not qualify is insufficient, and will cause the SBA to dismiss the size protest.
A SBA size determination issued in 2007 was not binding on the question of whether the same company was still small in 2013.
According to a recent decision of the SBA Office of Hearings and Appeals, there is no rule providing that an SBA Area Office must follow its own prior size determination. Rather, an SBA Area Office is free to issue a size determination contradicting its own prior ruling.
When it comes to the SBA’s ostensible subcontractor rule, managing a contract, by itself, is not enough to avoid affiliation.
As demonstrated in a recent decision of the SBA Office of Hearings and Appeals, a small business and its subcontractor violate the ostensible subcontractor rule whenever the subcontractor will perform the primary and vital work required under the prime contract–even if the small business will perform the management function.
Economic dependence affiliation under the SBA’s affiliation rules can be created by a single ongoing contract, according to the SBA Office of Hearings and Appeals.
In a recent size appeal decision, SBA OHA held that a single contract amounting to more than 90% of an 8(a) applicant’s revenues over two years resulted in economic dependence affiliation.
The SBA’s “successor-in-interest” affiliation rule provides that a government contractor can be affiliated with a dissolved or liquidated company, but only if the government contractor acquires “all, or nearly all” of the dissolved company’s assets and liabilities.
According to a recent commonsense decision of the SBA Office of Hearings and Appeals, the successor-in-interest affiliation rule does not apply when a government contractor acquires only some of the dissolved company’s assets and liabilities.
The SBA misevaluated a joint venture by basing its ineligibility decision on the joint venture’s revenues, rather than determining whether each joint venturer, individually, qualified as a small business, according to a recent decision of the SBA’s Office of Hearings and Appeals.
SBA OHA’s decision highlights what I like to call the “individual size treatment rule,” a special regulation requiring the SBA to deem a joint venture “small” under certain circumstances, even when the combined sizes of the joint venture’s members exceed the applicable size standard.