[Protest of Army Termination of Contract for Water and Sewer Lines]

A firm protested the Army's termination of its contract for water and sewer line replacement and its subsequent contract award to another bidder, contending that the: (1) Army improperly terminated its contract based on the discovery of the awardee's reference engineer's erroneous completion of the past performance questionnaire; (2) Army improperly evaluated proposals with respect to past performance, since some bidders failed to submit the required number of references; and (3) awardee's bid should be rejected as unbalanced, since the awardee proposed an unreasonably high hourly labor rate for two line items. GAO held that the Army: (1) reasonably terminated the protester's contract, since the award was predicated on a mistaken evaluation of another bidder's past performance; (2) reasonably evaluated the proposals in accordance with the solicitation's criteria; and (3) reasonably determined that the awardee's apparently high labor rates merely reflected a mathematical error. Accordingly, the protest was denied.