A new study by RAND Corp. has found that bid protests that defense contractors filed with the Government Accountability Office do not hamper the Defense Department’s procurement process for weapons and services, Bloomberg reported Thursday.
RAND’s National Defense Research Institute carried out the congressionally mandated study and found that the total number of DoD contracts challenged by companies with GAO rose from approximately 900 in fiscal 2008 to about 1,400 in fiscal 2016.
The report also showed that the number of contract challenges submitted by the top 11 defense contractors jumped from 26 in 2008 to 40 in 2009.
The percentage of bid protests is below 0.3 percent per billion dollars of the amount spent on military contracts and that companies are not likely to file meritless protests, according to the study.
“Policymakers should avoid drawing overall conclusions or assumptions about trends from one case when it comes to the efficacy of the bid protest system,†RAND noted in the report.
