Specialist123

Thank you all, we are actually working through it with the contractor. This question was more for my FYI. In the future, I do think I will push to have the pricing proposal sent to the tech team after the tech proposal. It is not our practice but I think there is benefit there. I will also check out Administration of Government Contracts, 5th ed., Chapter 2.

@formerfed The contractor did not sign as it was a proposal that we accepted. The service is a telecommunications service, in which various countries may have restrictions on suppliers, equipment, etc., or required special permitting. It is quite common to have 1 telecom carrier win an award but have to work with another telecom carrier that already has a point of presence at the location. In this instance, there is another common U.S. carrier that already exists in these 2 regions. So all the contractor would have to do it get the existing company to do what the two companies are already doing all across the globe, which is partner to provide the service. The major U.S. telecom carriers are competitors but they also work side by side with each other at thousands of locations. We are not privy to the specifics of this instance for why the existing carrier is now refusing the request from our contractor. If I had to guess then I'd say the existing carrier wants more consideration for the space, bandwidth, etc. These orders work like any other prime/sub relationship in that the Government has little to no involvement with the sub (local exchange carrier), we deal with the prime.

Long time reader, first time poster. There is a situation in which a single award IDIQ was solicited competitively for services globally. Several existing locations were grouped by region and each region would be its own IDIQ. The solicitation required contractors to bid on a list of existing sites to continue service in order to be rated acceptable. There were two vendors in the competition but between the award of the first region and the subsequent regions one competitor withdrew from all regions. All regions were awarded to the same remaining competitor. Recently, the awardee has stated they cannot provide services in two locations that were included in the site list and subsequently priced by the awardee. Upon review of the proposal, the awardee made a note in the price proposal narrative that services may not be available in those 2 locations due to local restrictions. The price proposal was not reviewed by the technical team and the price analyst had not notated this anywhere. Award has bee made and orders are underway. The proposal was not incorporated into the award. The solicitations stated "In the Technical/Management volume, address the proposed approach to meeting or exceeding the minimum performance or capability requirements of each technical/management subfactor, as well as the risks in the proposed approach in terms of technical/performance, cost, and/or schedule." The issue seems to be stemming from the vendor not wanting to work with a local vendor in the areas and probably having to pay more than they thought they would for subcontracting. Question: In this scenario, is the contractor still liable for the 2 locations or is the fact that the Government found their proposal to be acceptable and made award relieve contractor responsibility? The current argument is they have to perform to the requirements of the PWS and the included award attachments (being the site locations) but this is my first experience with this type of scenario. Thanks in advance for your comments.