Junius

I once worked in an office that used to prefer to give post-award debriefings in person and have an open dialog with the unsuccessful offeror. However, after a couple of contentious briefings in which protests were later filed, the office instituted a policy of providing only written debriefings. The offeror then has a limited timeframe in which they could submit questions, also in writing. I can understand why contractors would be put off by that.

Most of the poorly written J&As I've seen in contract file audits have been those written and approved solely by a lazy contracting officer, and often they also fail to publicize the J&A. J&As that are reviewed and approved by multiple higher-graded contracting/legal personnel (in this case, two GS-14s and a GS-15) are typically not so poorly written and justified. You have to keep in mind, too, that this probably went through some kind of policy review prior to the CoCO or competition advocate reviews. It reflects poorly on an entire contracting organization as opposed to one CO.

The obfuscation of FAR 8 and 16 in this document is not very surprising to me. When I worked in a USAF contracting office, I knew of COs that believed that the AF NETCENTS contracts were federal supply schedules governed by FAR 8 rather than FAR 16. I had hoped that maybe the CO in this case lazily chose the wrong document template (i.e. a FAR 8 template in lieu of a FAR 16 template), but the numerous errors in the section titles, such as section "Y" and VII, lead me to believe that they manually typed up this little number.