Patterns of Procurement

As a recent big acquisition by the Department of Education (ED) for IT services shows, GAO takes the integrity of the procurement system very seriously. The case sheds light on how agencies and contractors should respond when they believe the integrity of the procurement process may be threatened. Specifically, contractors may need to self-report breaches of the integrity rules, affected competitors need to act promptly to preserve their rights, and agencies must investigate problems and take appropriate action to ensure a fair procurement.

View the full article at Petrillo & Powell's Patterns of Procurement.

When the Department of Homeland Security tried to migrate its IT support from a single contract to a series of task orders, they created quite the quagmire. From go, DHS' process for evaluating offerors' technical capabilities was unusual, and when contracts were awarded, disappointed contractors moved to protest. Yet when it came to light that the agency had altered evaluation documents once protests were underway, GAO swiftly intervened. 

View the full article here. 

Contracts with the Federal Government represent big bucks for technology companies. According to ITDashboard.gov, government agencies spent a whopping $82.8 billion on information technology investments in FY2016, a number that’s poised to grow in the next two years. It’s no wonder, then, that technology companies take government contracts seriously. So when tech giant Palantir Technologies could not get the Army to consider its commercial IT system, they protested. And ultimately, the Court of Federal Claims decided in their favor.

 View the full article here. 

The Contractor Performance Assessment Reports System (CPARS) is a tool used by federal agencies to record their evaluations of contractors’ performance. A poor evaluation will jeopardize a contractor’s chance of winning new contract awards. Contractors can respond to poor evaluations by providing input when they feel they’ve been unfairly assessed. Yet in the recent case of CompuCraft, a successful appeal to the Civilian Board of Contract Appeals found that there were limits to how completely they could correct their poor evaluation. Nonetheless, their efforts at redressing their improper negative rating provide an important template for other contractors who find themselves in similar circumstances.

CompuCraft, Inc., CBCA No., 2017., Mar. 1, 2017

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For losing contractors, the question of whether to protest is a tricky one. Contractors often move to protest when the requirements seem to favor one competitor over another, or when the rules of the procurement are unclear. But there’s an important difference between an agency displaying an abuse of discretion and simply utilizing the flexibility written into the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR). Two recent cases shed light on where that distinction may lie.

Professional Service Industries,Inc. v. United States, et al., 129 Fed. Cl. 190 (2016)

SSI, B-413486, et al., Nov. 3, 2016.

View the full article here.