(Editor’s Note.  It’s a good idea to know the type of protests that tend to be successful.  Here are a few recent ones that may be relevant to our readers.)

The Navy awarded a contract for information technology support and infrastructure services following ratings by offerors, oral presentations and best and final offers.  The protester asserted the award was not reasonable because the winners higher technical rating was not justified.  The GAO examined the evaluation record which consisted of only three documents – an “extremely brief and conclusionary” initial evaluation, the committee’s revised evaluation virtually unchanged from the earlier one and the CO’s source selection memorandum which adopted the committee’s findings with little further explanation.  The GAO sustained the protest because the Navy did not adequately document its evaluation of the proposals resulting in no way of knowing whether the selection was reasonable (Future-Tec Management Systems Inc., GAO, B0283793.5).

Beneco protested an award of three indefinite quantity engineering and construction service contracts where the solicitation required the awards to be based on a price/technical tradeoff and specified that technical evaluation factors were significantly more important than price.  Beneco was ranked 36% higher for technical merit versus the awardee of the first contract while its price was 27% higher.  In the tradeoff decision, the CO rejected the proposal stating it was unreasonable to pay over $500,000 to have the same project built by a better contractor and also cited FAR 15.611 that requires a selection to be price driven.  Having rejected the proposal, the CO did not compare Beneco’s proposal against the lower-rated proposals for the other two awards.  Beneco protest asserted the government violated the evaluation scheme of the solicitation by not weighing technical merit as significantly more important than price.  The GAO agreed with Beneco, stating the record showed there was no consideration of the tradeoffs between Beneco’s high technical rating and high price against the other offerors but rather a simple unwillingness to pay the 27%.  This effectively converted the tradeoff from an evaluation where technical merit was more important than price to a “price competition between two acceptable proposals.” (Beneco Enterprises, Inc. Comp. Gen Dec. B-283154.)

In a bidding for a dike renovation contract, the government gave a 40 percent weight to a subfactor in its technical evaluation for an item – “bioengineered slope protection” – never mentioned in the solicitation.  An successful bidder protested the award asserting the agency failed to comply with the solicitation’s evaluation criteria and used unstated experience subfactors in the evaluation.  The GAO agreed and overturned the award, stating it is fundamental that offerors be advised of the bases on which proposals will be evaluated and added agencies may not give importance to specific factors, subfactors, or other criteria beyond that which would reasonably be expected by the offerors (Loyd H. Kessler Inc., GAO, B-284693).

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