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Agency Reasonably Distrusts Its Own Estimates

Client Alert | less than 1 min read | 04.27.04

In Burney & Burney Constr. Co. (Mar. 19, 2004), GAO upheld an agency’s rejection of a low bid as unbalanced because some of the line items were significantly overstated and, if the agency had ordered more than the estimated quantities for those line items under this requirements contract, the agency would end up paying more under the low bid than under the next-to-low bid. GAO upheld this approach even though the agency used different estimated quantities for the unbalanced bidding analysis than it did for the price determination of the low bid, reasoning that using different estimates for different purposes was reasonable.

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Client Alert | 1 min read | 04.18.24

GSA Clarifies Permissibility of Upfront Payments for Software-as-a-Service Offerings

On March 15, 2024, the General Services Administration (GSA) issued Acquisition Letter MV-2024-01 providing guidance to GSA contracting officers on the use of upfront payments for acquisitions of cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).  Specifically, this acquisition letter clarifies that despite statutory prohibitions against the use of “advance” payments outside of narrowly-prescribed circumstances, upfront payments for SaaS licenses do not constitute an “advance” payment subject to these restrictions when made under the following conditions:...