GSA ALLIANT 2 Small Business Awards Rescinded After Protest

Bad news for any of the 81 small businesses that were awarded a place on the decade’s largest IT contract. For the 10-year $15 billion ALLIANT 2 IT services contract vehicle, the court of federal claims has just ruled that the General Services Administration (GSA) will have to re-score every single bid for the small business portion.

Since March 14, 2018, there have been various protests submitted to the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) over the awards, and while many have been dismissed, the Chantilly, Virginia-based IT company Citizant, Inc. successfully landed a rescission of all awards. They reported that there were concerns with contracting officer biases and indicated that the GSA scored bid pricing without clear criteria. The company also provided evidence that GSA improperly credited competitors’ bids for using satisfactory cost accounting systems.

Specifically, Citizant stated that the GSA calculated the deviation range of the various proposals and any bids that fell outside of that range were only provided detailed grading for direct labor rates. Pricing was assessed without adequate detail and via two conflicting sets of calculations against the deviation range, per the ruling.

Federal Claims Court Chief Judge Margaret Sweeney has ruled that all submissions to ALLIANT 2 SB must be re-scored taking these considerations into light. The GSA made awards to the 81 companies using a point-based scoring system (the 80^th and 81^st position was the result of a tie). It appears that not all company scores were affected by the faulty scoring, so many will likely hold on to their award after the re-scoring.

ALLIANT 2 SB is currently listed in pre-award status on FBO and is currently not accepting new proposals. While we’re sure that the GSA would prefer to not open up the possibility of having additional new proposals come in for evaluation, there may be further protests as contractors will likely point out the changed evaluation criteria so they can get their bid in.

On the ALLIANT 2 large-business side, everything was kicked off in June of 2018, however things are off to a somewhat slow start. Per EZGovOpps analysis, about $87 Million dollars have been obligated so far.

To read more about ALLIANT 2, ALLIANT 2 SB and gain access to EZGovOpps analyst updates, please visit this link if you are an EZGovOpps subscriber (you must be signed in), or sign up for a free trial today.