Claim for Recovery of Proposal Preparation Costs Is Denied

Protester maintained that a sole-source award to competitor was improper, since competitor was not the sole source of a restricted component. Protester claimed recovery of proposal preparation costs, because the Army issued the solicitation with actual knowledge of the technical defects in it, thereby unreasonably inducing it to submit a useless proposal. While protester may have been misled by an inadvertent misleading statement in the request for proposals (RFP), it was on notice of restrictive features of RFP and possibility that alternate proposal might not be accepted.