Author Archives: terrenceoconnor

A recent GAO decision resolves for the time being a critical small business issue: whether the 3-year revenue average for determining small business status was still valid. GAO denied a protest that argued the 3-year period had been revised by a new law that extended the 3-year period…

GAO recently addressed a relatively rare protest issue: a protest of the government’s conversion of a sealed bid solicitation into a negotiated procurement solicitation based on unreasonable bid prices.  When the Army wanted to build an access control point at Fort Meade, MD, it decided to…

A protestor that loses a decision before the Government Accountability Office (GAO) can protest the recommended GAO corrective action to the U.S. Court of Federal Claims (COFC). As a recent COFC decision shows, the protestor can also challenge the way the Agency is carrying out the corrective action. The Air…

In the rush to get a proposal finalized and submitted to the government on time, it’s understandable that offerors cannot always labor over every word in every sentence. Unfortunately, attention to detail is critical. Recently, an offeror’s failure to write its technical proposal to clearly give itself credit for previous…

We have previously blogged about some of the critical differences between an offer submitted in response to a Request for Proposal (RFP) and a quote submitted in response to a Request for Quotation (RFQ). A recent decision of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) highlighted another difference: language in an…

The suspension of a long-time government contractor following a security breach shows that the government intends to use the suspension/debarment process to investigate and perhaps punish contractors for cyber security failures. According to limited information in the Government’s System for Award Management (SAM), Perceptics, LLC was declared “Ineligible (Proceedings Pending)”…

Even though past performance evaluations play a critical role in a contractor getting future contracts, contractors rarely challenge bad past performance ratings or the improper way an agency carries out its required past performance evaluation responsibilities described in FAR Subpart 42.15. One of the most common agency errors seems to…

A common contractor complaint is that the government rarely does things differently – that there is little, if any, initiative, in government contracting. Surprisingly, according to a little-known provision of the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR), innovation in government contracting is FAR policy. Even more surprising, perhaps, is that FAR gives…

When submitting proposal information to the government, an offeror needs to know that not all deadlines are the same. For example, the deadline for submitting technical information is typically the deadline for submission of initial offers. However, the deadline for submitting responsibility information can be much later in the solicitation…