“In this case, the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) issued the solicitation via the GSA’s federal supply schedule for operations and management of the agency’s identity management system. Award was to be made on a best-value tradeoff basis considering corporate experience, performance work statement response, a challenge exercise, and section 508 compliance. Evaluation of quotes was to be made in two phases. During the first phase, vendors were to submit quotations covering corporate experience only. During the second phase, the other factors and price would be considered…”
“A protest followed in which the agency said it would take corrective action as Bana did not have a valid FSS contract at the time Omni submitted its phase one quotation. OB was excluded as was Omni. However, after another dispute, Omni was allowed to continue in the competition as the prime. Omni correctly noted to the agency that the original arrangement had Omni as prime, and primes can use subcontractors not on the FSS.
The offerors again made their submissions. Curiously, in the subsequent evaluations, the agency evaluated Omni’s quote for three of the four factors and pricing but evaluated the old OB quote for the final factor. The agency then awarded Omni the contract, and this protest followed…”
“’In allowing the Omni-Prime vendor to submit a revised quotation to replace the phase two quotation submitted by the eliminated Bana-Omni CTA vendor, the agency failed to obtain a complete replacement quotation from Omni-Prime by not conducting or allowing for a new factor 3 oral presentation. In sum, the agency based its selection decision on a quotation that was composed of submissions from two different vendors. This…is squarely at odds with the agency’s contemporaneous finding in response to Omni’s agency-level protest challenging the elimination of the Bana‑Omni CTA vendor from the competition. There, the agency recognized that the two vendor configurations were separate respondents to the solicitation.’
The protest was sustained as a result.
This is an unusual case as the DHHS, even after excluding a quotation, nonetheless used information from that quotation as part of its evaluation. It sort of makes sense: In the original phase two solicitation, Omni and Bana were the companies working together. The same went for the evaluation that was protested in this matter. It goes to show that the form does matter, and that simply rearranging into a CTA after the fact can completely disrupt an offeror’s chances if they are not careful…” Read the full article here.
Source: Transformers: Offerors in Disguise – GAO Sustains Protest Regarding Evaluation Based on Separate Offers from the same Offeror – By John Holtz, March 1, 2022. SmallGovCon.
