At its core, the purpose of an OCI (organizational conflict of interest) clause is to prevent somebody from having an unfair competitive advantage by knowing information about an upcoming procurement or what is required to win or lose, or some other secretive information about what’s going on in that particular contract.
The dilemma is how to define organizational conflict of interest in a way that doesn’t prohibit the incumbent from bidding on the contract. Because the incumbent does know details about the customer and the contract, and already has people operational in the agency.
So when there is an incumbent in place, the RFP has to written in such a way that the evaluation requirements don’t give the incumbent an unfair advantage. In addition, we don’t want a situation where a contractor is helping to define the requirements, and therefore has advanced knowledge.
Acquisitions/support work is one of three contractor services that are most likely to get into OCI issues. Clearly, if you’re working as an acquisitions support consultant supporting a contracting office, you shouldn’t be able to bid on anything that you helped to work on, because you know the stuff that didn’t go into the RFP.
Organizational conflicts of interest are discussed in FAR Part 209.5, and there’s now a new subpart 3.11 that specifically addresses contractors in acquisition functions. It’s important to be improving these definitions because frankly lots of people have been tripped up on OCI clauses and OCI issues, particularly in these last eight years.
Ultimately we must prohibit the person who’s creating an RFP (helping the government create one) from bidding on that RFP, so they don’t have an unfair advantage over you or me.
