Have you ever bought a house? For most people, this represents a huge investment in money and commitment to an extended financial contract. You don’t enter into this lightly. Your search may take months to find the house you want. You may hire subject matter experts (SMEs) such as a realtor and a mortgage broker, to help you find the best possible house meeting all of your specifications and desires, and to provide the best financial arrangement to allow you to make the purchase. Because you will live with and maintain this house for many years to come, you, and your SMEs, ask dozens of questions. You inspect the property and your SMEs send their inspectors. Finally, you negotiate the best deal you can for the property that you have selected as your best value solution. Why should the federal government do any less when getting ready to spend large amounts of tax payer dollars to provide products and services that the government will work with, use, and maintain for many years?
In the government, the individuals who will use the product or service (the users) are the ones who define exactly what they need in order to accomplish their mission. They need for offerors to clearly show that their product or service will perform the functions in the way they need. They will identify those traits that are “required” (those “form, fit and function” specifications that absolutely must be included) and sometimes include “desired” traits (those things the user would like to have, but can trade off if need be). They need sufficient information from offerors to see that the product or service does in fact meet the specified requirements, and what, if any, desired traits are also included in the offer. The users prioritize their “desired” traits and “trade-off” these functions against their pre-determined budget for the buy.
Federal Program Managers (PM) are charged with the responsibility of identifying and selecting the products and services that meet the needs of their users. They ask for information in order to evaluate which proposed approach best meets the government’s needs or which contractor will provide the expertise needed by the government team they will be supporting. Maybe it’s which piece of technology will help achieve the mission better, save lives, or allow the user to focus on more important issues. Perhaps it’s which contractor offers the best level of technical expertise and the most reasonable number of man-hours that will help users perform their mission. This means not breaking the bank with over educated, over experienced senior level subject matter experts, but also not expecting that a junior level programmer with one year of experience is going to lead a team of other inexperienced programmers in developing and maintaining a critical software program. PM’s are looking for information to determine which offer will meet the requirements of the most users satisfactorily, so they get the best “bang-for-the-buck.”
I’m sure you’ve heard me say before that “The Federal government is not in the business of putting businesses out of business.” Accepting an offer that is so low that it appears that the contractor does not understand the scope of the effort will only result in poor performance, dissatisfied users, frustrated PMs, and the probability that the contract will need to be re-competed much earlier than usual. Failure to perform the contract successfully could well result in damaging a company financially, if not outright putting them out of business! Contracting Officers (CO) are charged with ensuring that the selected contractors are responsible, meaning that the selected awardee is actually able to perform the effort satisfactorily for the amount they have proposed. That means ensuring that contracts are awarded to companies who are financially sound, and have the resources and the capability to perform the contract.
To make that determination they must often ask offerors to provide financial documents (yes, even huge corporations), showing they are solvent and have the financial capacity to not only perform the contract, but to stay in business while they do. They will also look at the offeror’s experience in managing and performing contracts of similar size and scope to determine their probability of successful performance and the resulting risk to the government.
In 20+ years as a Contracting Specialist/Officer, I never heard anyone in the contracting shop say, “Today, I think I’ll add a bunch of requirements to my solicitation to make it harder and more confusing for offerors to submit a proposal.” Some documents, such as completed Representations and Certifications, signed SF 1449s/33s, and Amendments, and completion of administrative clauses, are to meet legal and contractual requirements established by the federal government and enforced through their contracts.
Bottom line is, the information that the government requests from offerors is required for the users, PMs, and Contracting Officers to make the best possible choices when spending tax payer dollars while meeting all applicable laws and regulations.