Court Enjoins Awards of Government-wide Task Order Contracts Because of "False Precision" in the Numerical Ratings of the Offerors
An important decision, Serco, Inc. v. United States was issued by the United States Court of Claims last week in a case involving a government-wide acquisition contract (“GWAC”) awarded by the General Services Administration (GSA) to provide technology products and services to the entire federal government. Sixty-two offerors competed for a chance to perform task orders under this GWAC. In ranking the technical proposals of these offerors, GSA teams assigned adjectival ratings to various subfactors and then converted them into whole numbers ( e.g., 3, 4, 5). Combining, averaging and weighting these figures, the agency ended up with technical scores that were carried out to three decimal points ( e.g., 3.817), and it made critical distinctions among the sixty-two offerors based upon the thousandths of a point. Based upon these technical scores, twenty-eight contractors were designated by the agency as “presumptive awardees.” GSA then purported to conduct price reasonableness and tradeoff analyses to take into account price-but, conspicuously, none of these comparisons resulted in any of the “presumptive awardees” being displaced by a lower-priced offeror. Indeed, GSA ultimately made awards to offerors whose prices were 59th, 60th and 61st out of the sixty-two offers-prices that the agency claims were “fair and reasonable” despite being twice as high as the lowest winning offer, as much as thirty percent higher than the independent government cost estimate, and more than two standard deviations to the mean of the evaluated prices for all the offerors.
The so-called “Alliant” GWAC is to be administered by GSA pursuant to section 5112(e) of the Clinger-Cohen Act. Alliant is designed to provide federal agencies with a broad range of information technology (IT) products and services, including computers, ancillary equipment, software, firmware and similar applications, network design, support services, and related resources such as telecommunication and security. Alliant contemplates the multiple-award of indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity (MA/IDIQ) contracts, with a ceiling of $50 billion, to be performed, on a task order basis, during a five-year base period and one, five-year option period. Under the Alliant Solicitation No. TQ2006MCB0001 (the Solicitation), individual task orders could range as high as $1 billion in value; successful offerors, however, are guaranteed a minimum take of only $2,500. Alliant offers a wide range of contract types, including fixed-price, cost reimbursement, labor-hour and time and material.
On September 26, 2007, Serco, Inc. (Serco) filed a complaint in this court challenging the award decisions and seeking a variety of injunctive relief. Subsequently eight other unsuccessful offerors filed protests and were joined in the Serco protest. GSA issued the Solicitation on September 29, 2006. The Solicitation advised that GSA “contemplate[d making] approximately 25 to 30 awards ... but reserves the right to place fewer or more awards, depending upon the quality of the proposals received.” Those receiving awards under the Solicitation are eligible to perform task orders under the contract. The Solicitation indicated that “[a]ward will be made to responsible Offerors whose proposals are determined to provide the ‘best value’ to the Government.”
In a scholarly opinion, by Judge Francis M. Allegra, the Court concluded that GSA, “in attaching ”talismanic significance to technical calculations that suffer from false precision, made distinctions that, in their own right, likely were arbitrary, capricious and contrary to law, but certainly became so when the agency failed adequately to account for price and to make appropriate tradeoff decisions. Those compounding errors prejudiced the plaintiffs and oblige this court to set aside the awards in question and order appropriate injunctive relief.” The Court did not agree that there was a rational basis to make distinctions between offerors on the basis of thousandths of a point. Judge Allegra ruled that “Precision of thought is not always reflected in the number of digits found to the right of a decimal point – indeed, as with other constructs, there can be, to paraphrase Holmes, a “kind of precision that obscures.” Ultimately, Court ruled that the agency made award decisions that were “arbitrary, capricious and otherwise contrary to law.”
The Government intimated that the court should afford the agency more slack than usual, on account of the size of this procurement and the number of offerors to be evaluated. But, the Court found that “given the extraordinary breadth of discretion already afforded to agencies in government procurements, it is hard to fathom what form a still more relaxed rule of deference might take. Would such a rule permit the adoption of procedures that would allow the agency to rely on performance information that is unverified and unresponsive to its stated evaluation criteria? Not, it would seem, without a wholesale revision of the fairness principle embodied in CICA and the FAR - ‘a cornerstone of effective competition.’ Cibinic & Nash, supra, at 899. Would such a rule allow the agency to treat demonstrably imprecise statistics as being precise? Not unless deference somehow magically makes insignificant digits significant. And would this heightened deference permit the agency to dispense with any reasonable consideration of price, leaving that question for a later day? Certainly not, again, without some substantial modification of CICA and FASA-and with Congress heading the opposite direction in tending, in recent years, toward enhancing, rather than diminishing, the importance of price. But whatever the reach or meaning of the salvific rule defendant would have this court apply, one thing is certain-it has no foundation in the Solicitation, the FAR or the governing procurement statutes. Per contra. While an agency certainly may choose to pursue a GWAC pursuant to its mandate to ‘efficiently fulfill the Government's requirements,’ it may not obtain efficiencies in derogation of the FAR and other governing statutes. Nor, as should be obvious, does the raw size of a procurement afford an agency the license to engage in what otherwise would be arbitrary and capricious conduct.”
