GAO Case Study Case in Point, File

GAO Case Study

Case in point, File B-293049 and B-293049.2 dated January 23, 2004 is a decision between the United States General Accounting Office and Computer Information Specialists, hereby known as CIS. The document, however, has been subjected to a GAO Protective Order, and therefore only a sanitized version has been approved for public release.

Facts of the Case- Essentially, the case involves a protest by Computer Information Specialists who bid on a contract (RFP NLM-03-101/.SAN). CIS bid on the RFP, which was issued by the National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health to acquire telecommunications support services at the Bethesda, Maryland campus. CIS alleges that the government awarded the contract to the Open Technology Group (OTG) based on misevaluated research and made an unreasonable source decision. CIS holds that they had the more appropriate proposal, much of which was ignored by the government evaluators.

Issues Involved in Case- The review of the decision by the NLM and NIH was made by the U.S. GAO's Comptroller General of the United States. Several relevant facts were uncovered during the investigation:

The agency received a number of proposals and established a range for four firms. Each portion of the proposal was assigned a weight, with value being more important than price.

In the matrix, OTG received the highest score of the four, CIS the lowest. However, of five evaluations, four only prepared cursory narrative comments to even support their scoring of the CIS proposals. Any deficiencies brought to CIS's attention were immediately cured, according to the company.

Once these deficiencies were cured, the evaluators raised their scores but provided little or no justification, thus the entire decision on CIS was based on the 5th evaluator (20% of the scoring committee).

The conclusions reached by Evaluator 5 were found to be problematic, unreasonable and based more on subjective opinion and commentary on prose rather than factual data.

The evaluator's further language does not include a technical approach, nor an explanation of such an approach. It was found to be unprofessional and unsubstantiated in relation to decisions necessary.

Decisions (Holdings) -- The appeal of CIS was sustained by the GAO and recommendations ensued.

Decision Support -- The GAO was not in a position to re-evaluate the proposals, only to rule on whether the proposals from vendors had been properly evaluated. The gist of the support was that out of five evaluators, only one, constituting 20 per cent of the decision, had comments. Those comments, however, were relatively unprofessional and did not focus upon the issues at hand in the RFP. They were, then, essentially useless which, when combined with the lack of supporting material from the other 80 per cent of the evaluators essentially meant that CIS had not been fairly evaluated for the RFP. Further, the GAO ruled that not only were the materials on CIS misrepresented, all the top four candidates were not evaluated properly. Recommendations were made:

Reevaluate the proposals of the top four competitive suppliers.

Reopen discussions to other vendors based on the likelihood that the OTG proposal was technically unacceptable.

Termination or renegotiation of any contracts in place may be necessary.

CIS should be reimbursed costs associated with filing and pursuing its protest, including reasonable attorney fees.