This article is an extract from the 5th edition of Government Procurement.
In its November 2018 determination in Harris Corporation v. Department of Public Works and Government Services, the Canadian International Trade Tribunal ordered a re-evaluation after finding that the government conducted a flawed technical evaluation. The dispute dealt with a Royal Canadian Mounted Police bidding process for night vision binoculars and replacement parts. The complainant alleged that the testing of the proposed equipment was not conducted in accordance with the process set out in the solicitation document. While there was nothing in the solicitation document stating that the technical assessments would be limited to the best-performing units, the Tribunal found that the government ignored the results for the worst performing units and only used the results from the best-performing units to calculate each bidder’s technical score. The Tribunal concluded that the government’s technical testing was unreasonable and ordered a re-evaluation. As this case illustrates, where government evaluators plan on conducting tests where they will be disregarding certain test results, they should disclose those plans in their solicitation documents to guard against future challenges to the reasonableness and transparency of their evaluation procedures.
