Earlier this month, the Government Accountability Office (“GAO”) sustained a bid protest challenging the agency’s decision to exclude the protester from consideration based on a potential organizational conflict of interest (“OCI”).
The GAO decision serves as a reminder that an offeror that is excluded from a competition on the basis of a perceived OCI can challenge that decision in a protest before GAO. And although GAO will give the agency a fair amount of deference, it will nonetheless sustain a protest where it concludes that the agency’s decision was unreasonable.
In the Archimedes Global bid protest, the contractor submitted a proposal to perform services in response to a solicitation issued by the Department of Homeland Security. The solicitation included a clause permitting the agency to disqualify the incumbent contractor from competing for follow-on work because the predecessor contract required the incumbent to have access to non-public, procurement sensitive information. Archimedes’ proposal listed as key personnel two program managers currently working for the incumbent. And for that reason, the agency excluded Archimedes from consideration based on the grounds that those employees could have provided Archimedes with unequal access to information.
Keep reading this article at: https://www.insidegovernmentcontracts.com/2018/06/in-archimedes-bid-protest-government-contractor-takes-on-herculean-task-of-challenging-the-agencys-oci-determination-and-wins/
