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Solicitation Must Adequately Evaluate Contract Type and Not Have Arbitrary Disqualifications

Client Alert | 1 min read | 09.09.16

In CACI, Inc.-Federal (Aug. 3, 2016), GAO sustained two pre-award challenges to the cost/price evaluation scheme in DISA’s $17.5B ENCORE III IDIQ solicitation. GAO held, first, that the solicitation did not provide an adequate basis to compare the relative cost of competing proposals because, despite anticipating roughly half of the ENCORE III task orders to be cost-reimbursable, the RFP did not require offerors to propose any cost-reimbursable labor rates and, second, that a provision that would eliminate any offeror with a total price more than 50 percent below a “trimmed average total proposed price” of other offerors was “entirely arbitrary in selection and application” because the record did not reflect that such a price difference would pose any inherently high performance risk.

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Client Alert | 4 min read | 10.30.26

Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right: GAO Sustains Protest Where Agency Tried to Fix PIA Violation with a Second PIA Violation

Recent sustain decisions by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) in Fluor Federal Solutions, LLC and Reliance Test & Technology send a clear message: when an agency tries to fix a Procurement Integrity Act (PIA) violation by committing a second one, the cure can be just as fatal as the disease. The cases involved the U.S. Air Force’s $1.8 billion procurement for O&M services at Elgin Air Force Base. During discussions, the Air Force inadvertently released a pricing overview slide with all offerors’ bottom-line evaluated costs to Reliance Test & Technology, which immediately notified the agency of the error. In response, the Air Force decided to level the playing field by providing the same information to all the other offerors in the procurement, stating, “[o]fferors may consider this disclosure in their [final proposal revision].”...