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...

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…