In its January 2012 decision in Matter of ITT Systems Corporation, the Government Accountability Office ordered the Department of the Army to conduct a re-evaluation after finding that the Department’s original evaluation record failed to document changes to the selected bidder’s staff pricing models. The case dealt with a bidding process for logistics support services and, as the GAO noted, the pricing model that was ultimately selected varied from that in the original bid yet:
Despite these significant changes in the offerors’ proposed staffing for cost evaluation purposes, the record contains no explanation of why the changes were made. In particular, the changes are memorialized in Excel spreadsheets that reflect the agency’s mathematical calculations of the changes, but these spreadsheets include no narrative explanation of the reasons for the changes. AR, exhs. 16a-16e. Additionally, although the record includes a separate narrative cost report, the report makes no mention of the reasons underlying the agency’s staffing adjustments for cost evaluation purposes, and instead simply describes the agency’s approach to making the changes.
The GAO found the lack of proper record keeping was highly problematic since it appeared to show that evaluators made unilateral changes to the complainant’s proposed staffing when calculating costs and failed to justify the evaluation outcome:
In sum, the record shows that the agency made significant changes to the offerors’ proposed staffing in the overwhelming majority of their proposed labor categories when conducting its most probable cost evaluation, but the underlying basis for these changes is not memorialized in the record. In addition, the record shows that the agency failed to reconcile its evaluation in a manner that demonstrates consistency between its cost and technical evaluation findings. We conclude that the agency’s evaluation of proposals is unsupported in the record and, thus, is unreasonable.
The GAO therefore upheld that complaint and ordered the Department to conduct a re-evaluation. As this case illustrates, the failure to conduct demonstrably fair evaluations by keeping accurate evaluation records can be fatal to the ultimate defensibility of a government contract award decision. To better ensure the soundness of their contract awards, public institutions should therefore ensure that they conduct bid evaluations that are consistent with properly designed and disclosed evaluation procedures and that they carefully document those bid evaluations.
