“The Government Accountability Office has partially sustained a pre-award protest over the CIO-SP4 solicitation in which plaintiffs argued the procurement unfairly disadvantaged large companies in mentor-protégé arrangements.
In a decision Tuesday, the oversight body agreed that restrictions on the amount of evidence of prior experience that large companies are able to show are unfair and recommended that the National Institutes of Health Information Technology Acquisition and Assessment Center (NITAAC) either amend the solicitation or provide further justification for the requirements…”
“The current CIO-SP4 solicitation restricts large companies in mentor-protégé arrangements from submitting more than two pieces of evidence in support of a bid.
GAO found that NITAAC did not provide a rationale for the decision and recommended that the agency should either reconsider the limitations or provide further justification to contractors…”
“Although it agreed with the plaintiffs’ challenge that the solicitation limits experience examples for large businesses, GAO rejected two further complaints about the solicitation.
First, GAO rejected an argument that agencies are forbidden from making an improper responsibility determination based on the experience of a protégé member. GAO also rejected the contention that bidders were improperly required to submit information about the obligated value of prior contracts…” Read the full article here.
Source: GAO partially sustains bid protest over CIO-SP4 treatment of large business mentors – By John Hewitt Jones, November 24, 2021. FedScoop.
