GSA will re-evaluate Alliant proposals

In response to a decision by the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, the General Services Administration announced on Wednesday that it will re-evaluate all 62 proposals received for its Alliant information technology services contract.

On March 5, Judge Francis Allegra ruled that the criteria GSA used to evaluate the proposals was "arbitrary and capricious." He barred GSA from using the same faulty data in any future Alliant awards. Allegra also ordered the agency to either re-evaluate the proposals by taking into account pricing or work out a mutually satisfactory solution with the eight companies that filed award protests. The judge said GSA had based its award decisions on flawed past performance data rather than best value.

"While this is the most time consuming of the outcomes GSA could pursue, it's also the one that they were inevitably going to have to pursue," said Larry Allen, president of the Coalition for Government Procurement, a Washington-based contractor trade association. "If GSA had tried the avenue of talking with the people who protested and then someone else called them out, it's entirely possible they would have to evaluate everyone's offer again anyway."

It is unknown how long the re-evaluation process will take or when the contract will be awarded. GSA was unavailable for comment at press time.

Alliant is a $50 billion, 10-year governmentwide acquisition contract that federal agencies were slated to begin using in 2007 to buy an array of IT services. Sixty-two companies submitted bids and 29 were selected as service providers in July 2007. Following the contract awards, eight companies filed protests arguing that the process used to evaluate them violated the law, a stance that was supported by the court's ruling.

"They didn't want to have to do this," said Allen. "It's time-consuming, and you have to show that you are spending a certain amount of time performing the evaluation … I'd be surprised if we saw something much before the end of June where Alliant might be ready to move forward."

The huge dollar figure associated with Alliant, he said, increased the pressure on potential bidders. "Companies had no choice but to pursue it and protest the decision if they lost, or risk being shut out of a vehicle that will drive a lot of business," Allen said. "When you hang that big of a number, companies get dollar signs in their eyes. If they are going to go down, they are going down swinging."

The possibility of another round of protests after the second set of awards raises the question of whether Alliant will drive much business in the current fiscal year, Allen said. Alliant surely will not generate the amount of business GSA had anticipated, he added. GSA likely will be dusting off several of its older contracting vehicles in the meantime. Allen said GSA's Wednesday press release listed several other governmentwide acquisition contracts, including Millennia, Answer, STARS and the IT Schedule 70 programs, that could be used for IT services.

Despite the protests, Allen said, the problem is more than the evaluation of bids. "It's only one part of the puzzle," he said. "The other part is that GSA set itself up for this in the acquisition planning phase by trying to put together a contract so large and expansive that it made it impossible for companies that might even be halfway qualified to let the opportunity go."

"The great irony is that everyone is into Alliant, while IT Schedule 70 keeps thumping along doing about $17 billion a year," said Allen. "What this means for GSA is that they are nowhere near out of the woods yet. We are pretty close to [being] back to square one."