There have been many recent changes to the regulations around bid protests, including one outlined by Sandra Erwin in a recent guest post about Pentagon contractors.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO), where most bid protests are filed, released a proposed rule on April 25, 2016 that hopes to clarify the protest process.
There are a couple of important things to understand about where these regulations are going. There’s a proposed $350 filing fee. Right now there’s no filing fee other than admin costs of lawyers creating a document.
This is not a prohibitive amount, but is enough to make people think twice before filing. People have been complaining for years about folks who file frivolous protests in order to hold onto a contract. In fact, one company got the government’s attention with their repeated protests and were prohibited from protesting again for a specific period of time.
The GAO is also proposing to extend the ability to protest below the current task order multiple-award contract threshold of $10 million. Clearly, the lower they go, the more protests they will encounter. This is a good thing in one sense because of the recognition that more opportunities are being competed on multiple-award task order contracts. The bad news is that there are more likely to be protests.
There are a lot other rules and regulations to understand about the bid protest process, but let’s end this post at the starting place: deciding whether or not to protest in the first place.
The fundamental issue around protests is a belief that the government, has “done you wrong,” in their evaluation. However, you have to understand that these evaluations are always subjective and if you are eliminated in the evaluation process, it’s because the technical evaluators or contracting officers wanted somebody else, pure and simple.
You have to be very careful about using protests. Not only does it cost you money in legal fees, and the time and energy involved, but you could be pissing off a future customer. Just because you lost this contract, doesn’t mean you won’t be bidding on the next one from the same agency customer. Should you ask for a debrief instead, and focus on the next opportunity?
