In June 2021, the Secret Service issued a task order for some of its telecom and IT service needs. AT&T Corp., B-421195 (Jan. 17, 2023). As is often the case, the award decision would be made on a best-value basis. Here, there would be four technical factors: Performance Management, Technical Approach, Transition Approach, and Past Performance. The agency received five proposals, one from AT&T and another from Lumen Corporation (You might remember them as CenturyLink) …
AT&T protested this award, and its argument rested on the fact that the CO had failed to include an explanation as to why he only noted nine strengths as opposed to the 42 strengths the evaluation team found. GAO agreed with AT&T noting “it is an agency’s obligation to adequately document the basis of its evaluation and best-value tradeoff, and, where an agency fails to do so, it runs the risk that our Office will be unable to determine whether the agency’s evaluation was reasonable. In addition, changes made by the SSA to the TET’s evaluation record must be adequately documented.” Furthermore, while GAO will consider post-protest explanations that provide a rationale and fill in previously unrecorded details, that is subject to the requirement that the explanation must be consistent with the record…
It is worth noting that GAO’s decision here rests entirely on the fact that the CO didn’t explain his reasoning, not that his decisions were somehow wrong. For example, GAO observed that the CO did provide reasons as to why he assigned Lumen more strengths than the evaluation team. In other words, what this all came down to is that the CO simply didn’t explain his decisions on AT&T’s proposal in the evaluation. Agencies have to explain their reasoning for their decisions in their documentation. They can be right as rain and it won’t matter if they don’t explain why they did what they did. GAO may have even agreed with the CO’s conclusions, but he didn’t show his work. This is something contractors should be on the lookout for when they get notified of award decisions… Read the full article here.