The U.S. Government Accountability Office has released its Bid Protest Annual Report to Congress for Fiscal Year 2016.
This report documents any cases where a federal agency did not fully implement a bid protest recommendation made by GAO or where a final protest decision was not given 100 days after it was submitted to the Comptroller General. For FY16, neither of these issues occurred.
The report also provides data on the overall protest filings for the year and includes a summary of the most predominant grounds for sustaining protests.
In FY16, GAO received 2,789 cases: 2,621 protests, 80 cost claims, and 88 requests for reconsideration. We closed 2,734 cases during the fiscal year: 2,586 protests, 61 cost claims, and 87 requests for reconsideration. Of the 2,734 cases closed, 375 were attributable to GAO’s bid protest jurisdiction over task orders.
The three most predominant grounds for sustaining protests were unreasonable technical evaluation, unreasonable past performance evaluation, unreasonable cost or price evaluation, and flawed selection decisions.
It’s important to note that a large number of protests filed with GAO do not reach a decision because agencies voluntarily take corrective action in response to the protest rather than defend the protest on the merits. Agencies are not required to report any of the reasons they decide to take voluntary corrective action.
So there’s really nothing too surprising in the report. The top four grounds for sustained protests are based on flawed evaluations by the agency. That does not necessarily mean the agency did anything wrong. When doing an evaluation in a source selection, the process may seem to be going as planned and the team genuinely believes they have made the best possible decision.
However once you get an outside agency looking at all the documentation, the tiny flaws can show up and those are what the GAO bases their opinions on. It’s hard to be perfect when you are under the microscope!