The General Services Administration will move forward in soliciting its $50 billion contract vehicle, Alliant 2, after the Government Accountability Office struck four pre-award protests on Jan. 17.
The GAO found that the methodologies for the IT services contract were valid, despite protests from four Virginia-based contractors over the terms of GSA’s request for proposal (RFP).
Read the decision here
GSA can now move forward with its evaluation of bids for the Alliant 2 Unrestricted and Alliant 2 Small Business contracts, which are expected to be awarded in fall 2017.
“This unprecedented decision reinforces the fact that government has the flexibility to try new and innovative source selection methodologies, among other things,” Mary Davie, assistant commissioner for Office of Information Technology Category at GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service, said in a blog post on GSA’s website.
“As a proactive partner with federal agencies, GSA is always willing to try new ways to better serve government and improve mission delivery.”
The Alliant 2 RFP provides for up to 60 contract awardees determined on an evaluation scheme where bidders assign themselves points in four categories to determine the “highest technically rated” bid “with a fair and reasonable price.”
The four Virginia-based companies — Sevatec, Inc., of Fairfax; InfoReliance Corporation, of Fairfax; Enterprise Information Services, Inc., of Vienna; and Buchanan & Edwards, of Arlington — protested the RFP on the grounds that the 60-awardee limit was too low for healthy competition on the task order level and the evaluation scheme was “unreasonably assigning certain points to small businesses.”
But the GAO struck down those protests, saying that the RFP was in line with the Federal Acquisition Regulation and that GSA had adequately encouraged competition in the bids.
Alliant 2 is one of many examples of a GSA contract beset by contractor protest delays. The agency extended its deadlines for bid submissions by two weeks in August following a protest filed by Enterprise Information Services over a suggested lack of cost realism review by GSA.
Agency officials said at the time that the deadline extension was not related to the protest, but instead to allow “offerors to collect their Contracting Officer-signed proposal templates from their client agencies.”
At an Aug. 2 event with the Association for Federal Information Resource Management prior to the deadline extension, Davie said that contract protests were now built into the solicitation process as an expected hurdle to awards.
“We expect them, unfortunately,” she said. “Everything we are doing, we’re like in an evaluation mode. But what we are trying to do through this whole thing is have more dialogue” with industry.
