This article is an excerpt from The Art of Tendering: A Global Due Diligence Guide, which is available for purchase.
In its February 2006 decision in Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc., the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) ordered the Department of Agriculture to amend its solicitation documents and disclose the relative weights of its evaluation factors and subfactors. The case involved a Request for Proposals (RFP) for mad cow disease testing kits. The complainant challenged the evaluation, alleging that the evaluation factors were not properly applied.
The GAO agreed, finding that the Department weighted its subfactors in descending order of importance instead of weighing those subfactors equally:
On this record, we find that the fact that the SSA weighted the subfactors of the technical capability factor in descending order of importance in making and justifying the award selection, rather than weighting them equally, as implicitly indicated by the solicitation, has undermined the reasonableness of the agency’s conclusions as to the relative merits of the proposals under this factor, including the conclusion that Bio-Rad’s proposal merited an overall rating of “good+” and IDEXX’s proposal merited a rating a “satisfactory.” Given this misevaluation, we cannot conclude that the award selection based upon this skewed weighting of the subfactors of the technical capability factor was reasonable.
After finding that the application of undisclosed weighting preferences skewed the evaluation process, the GAO ordered that the Department amend its RFP to state the relative weights of the subfactors in question and that it then seek revised proposals.
As this case shows, to ensure the transparency and defensibility of an evaluation process, the weightings of criteria and sub-criteria should be accurately and thoroughly disclosed. The failure to do so can undermine the integrity of an evaluation process and make the purchasing institution vulnerable to legal challenge.
