Georgia Tech Procurement Assistance Center

Shutdown leaves GAO with massive backlog of contractors’ bid protests

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Contractors could, and did, complain plenty during the government shutdown — but what they couldn’t do was lodge those complaints formally.

Bid protests, which allow government contractors to contest a lost contract with the Government Accountability Office, have become an increasingly significant part of the federal procurement process. In fiscal 2012, companies filed nearly 2,500 protests, up from about 1,650 in 2008.Typically, contractors argue that some part of their evaluation for a bid wasn’t fair — that the agency’s contracting officer didn’t give them enough credit for the good work they did in the past or unfairly judged the technical merits of their proposal, for example.

But after the GAO was forced to close Oct. 1, contractors couldn’t officially file new protests and couldn’t get responses to the ones they’d already filed. (The GAO allowed companies to e-mail their protests, but said the protests would be marked as filed the day the government reopened.)

Keep reading this article at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/capitalbusiness/shutdown-leaves-gao-with-massive-backlog-of-contractors-bid-protests/2013/10/18/75783a20-375a-11e3-80c6-7e6dd8d22d8f_story.html

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