In his debut column, Alan Chvotkin, executive vice president and counsel of the Professional Services Council, analyzes two recent cases involving the government contracting selection process.
In each case contractors protested what they considered were flawed methods in the government’s source selection and filed a protest. Chvotkin reviews the implications of these post-award protests.
One case involved a Veterans Administration Transformation Twenty-One Total Technology Next Generation (T4NG) contract worth between $700 million and $1 billion that Cognosante bid on. The Government Accountability Office announced a decision in February 2019 and recommended that the VA reevaluate all contract offers.
“The VA received seven bids and set a competitive range of six proposals. GAO disclosed that Cognosante was third lowest in price, was significantly higher than the price offered by the lowest-priced offeror but was significantly below the price of the apparent successful offeror,†Chvotkin wrote.
In another case Citizant, Inc, filed its post-award protest challenging the General Services Administration’s evaluation of proposals under the government-wide, multiple-award, ID/IQ Alliant 2 Small Business information technology contract. In March 2019 the U.S. Court of Federal Claims found that GSA made errors in their evaluation process and ordered GSA to reevaluate all the proposals it received.
“For the court to find these agency mistakes in GSA’s source selection evaluation is troubling for all the small business vendors who invested a lot of time and money in the preparation and submission of their offers,†Chvotkin wrote.
This is the first in an ongoing series of columns by Alan Chvotkin and colleagues at the Professional Services Council.
