Request for Reconsideration

A request was made for reconsideration of a decision which found that the Department of Energy (DOE) had not met its duty to obtain maximum practicable competition in its procurement for a computer-based message service contract. DOE excluded an otherwise qualified offerer due to its failure to demonstrate technical capability in one area of a benchmark test. The company asserted that its failure in the test was due to an operator error and not a deficiency in its software. In its request for reconsideration, DOE stated that the decision to eliminate the company was based on a failure which had been observed by several evaluators and that an examination of the firm's technical manual confirmed the fact that the company's software was inadequate. DOE also stated that the GAO recommendation that the company be allowed to complete another benchmark would significantly prejudice other offerers. GAO maintained that, if the apparent failure had been pointed out to the company during or immediately after the benchmark and the firm had asserted that the failure was due to an operator error, the question could have been easily resolved by repeating the exercise in question. Since DOE evaluators knew or should have known of the failure at the time that it occurred, and since the company was not notified of this failure until a month after the benchmark, DOE did not meet its duty to obtain maximum competition. Since the company had satisfied all other technical requirements for the contract, the GAO recommendation that it be allowed to successfully complete another benchmark required rerunning only the exercise in question and not the entire benchmark. In addition, GAO did not believe that a benchmark test should be run on a pass/fail basis. In the rare cases where an agency can justify such a test, the evaluators have the responsibility to point out failures at the time that they occur. Accordingly, the prior decision was affirmed.