In the recent bid protest decision of Halbert Construction Company Inc., the Government Accountability Office (GAO) illustrated the breadth of a procuring agency’s discretion in conducting a past performance evaluation.
Halbert Construction brought the protest after being excluded from the competitive range, arguing primarily that the Navy unreasonably included a non-relevant prior project in the past performance evaluation which led to Halbert Construction’s exclusion. The GAO sustained the protest based on the well- established principle that offerors must be treated equally because the Navy excluded another offeror’s past performance reference from the evaluation as not relevant under the solicitation’s relevancy criteria but then failed to do the same for the protestor.
More notable than the relatively straight-forward application of the disparate treatment principle was the decision’s discussion of the very broad discretion of agencies in past performance evaluations.
Keep reading this article at: https://www.insidegovernmentcontracts.com/2016/10/gao-decision-illustrates-breadth-agency-discretion-past-performance-evaluations/
