Georgia Tech Procurement Assistance Center

GSA rescinds all awards made on $15 billion Alliant 2 Small Business contract

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The government rescinded all awards made in the $15B Alliant 2 Small Business governmentwide acquisition contract for IT services procurement last week.

The move follows an order from the Court of Federal Claims that the General Services Administration must rescore every submission it received to address errors raised in protest from Virginia-based technology company, Citizant Inc.

The Alliant 2 SB is part of one of the largest federal IT opportunities of the decade. In February 2018, GSA announced its award to 81 small business, which federal agencies would be able to access for integrated IT solutions around their “current and evolving needs.” After the announcement, protests from dissatisfied bidders ensued.

In March 2018, Citizant, Inc. protested the bid to the Government Accountability Office. GAO dismissed the file in May 2018, but Citizant took complaints to court and won this week, resulting in the rescission.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.nextgov.com/cio-briefing/2019/03/gsa-rescinds-all-awards-made-15b-alliant-2-small-business-contract/155869/

GAO: DoD should clarify criteria for using LPTA

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Although Congress has restricted when the Dept. of Defense (DoD) might use lowest-price technically-acceptable (LPTA) contractor selection criteria, the Department has not followed this mandate.

Note: This article was written by Matthew Schoonover of Koprince Law, LLC and first appeared in SmallGovCon.

A recent GAO report highlights DoD’s struggle.  As of September 2018, DoD has not yet revised its regulations to reflect certain statutory restrictions against LPTA awards and, as a result, DoD contracting officers believe they are not yet required to follow these new requirements.

Candidly, I’m not so sure. But in any event, GAO’s report issued a couple of recommendations to help DoD fully implement the restrictions against LPTA procurements.

Let’s take a look.

Keep reading this article at: http://smallgovcon.com/statutes-and-regulations/gao-report-lpta/

Five factors for proposal evaluation: Creating bids that will survive a protest

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Submitting the winning bid is an exhilarating feeling, dimmed only by the following days, as the offeror waits to hear if others may file a protest.

Once a protest is filed, offerors options are limited.

One option that is available to offerors, but often ignored is the right to hire qualified counsel to represent their interests.  Government contract attorneys are in a unique position, in that, while they are ethically obligated to protect their client’s interests, they are prohibited from discussing certain information with their clients.  This frustrates offerors, and limits an attorney’s opportunities to provide valuable information about how things might have been different, had the offeror only done something different.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.bidprotestweekly.com/five-factors-for-proposal-evaluation-creating-bids-that-will-survive-a-protest/

Unstated evaluation criteria and waived solicitation requirements

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This week we’ll discuss two protest arguments that are, in some ways, two sides of the same coin: unstated evaluation criteria and waived or relaxed solicitation requirements.

In each, the focus of the protest is on what was required (or not required) by the solicitation and whether the agency’s evaluation was consistent with the information provided to offerors in the solicitation.

  • Unstated Evaluation Criteria – Under an unstated evaluation criteria theory, the protester must show that it was faulted for a weakness, or the awardee was credited with a strength, that has no logical relation to the stated evaluation criteria.
  • Waived or Relaxed Requirements – While an unstated evaluation criteria protest ground may concern an agency’s application of a requirement that does not exist in a solicitation, the waived or relaxed requirement protest ground involves the agency’s failure to apply a solicitation or specification requirement.

Keep reading this article at: http://www.mondaq.com/article.asp?articleid=642102

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