Protest Alleging That GPO Overstated Minimum Needs

The Government Printing Office (GPO), which contracts out certain work, proposed procurement of two teleprocessing applications for developing a sequence of prospective bidders for printing contracts to meet specific job characteristics, and for producing mailing labels for bid packages to be sent to those printing firms. Also, a database is to be created, consisting of all firms invited to bid and those to which previous awards have been made. GPO's specifications require a response time of less than 4 seconds, 90 percent of the time. Tymshare, a prospective supplier of the necessary electronic data processing equipment, is protesting the response time requirement as too narrow, and guarantees a 5-second response time, 98 percent of the time. GPO says that equivalency of this criterion with its own requirement cannot be satisfactorily calculated. Furthermore, 13 firms have demonstrated an ability to meet the GPO response time demands. GAO will not question an agency's determination of its minimum needs unless they are shown to be unreasonable. Since that is not the case in the present instance, Tymshare's protest is disallowed.