Social Security Administration Request for Reconsideration

A request was made by the Social Security Administration (SSA) for reconsideration of a prior decision concerning a firm's protest of the award by SSA of a lease with option to purchase multi-font optical scanning equipment. In that decision, GAO sustained the protest in part. The awardee's selection over the protester was based on the awardee's lower computed life cycle cost calculated from data produced by benchmarking the equipment proposed. SSA questioned the GAO findings, arguing that the decision was inconsistent with GAO findings in an earlier decision involving the same procurement. In that decision, GAO concluded that the protester had not demonstrated that the benchmark, as proposed by SSA, was arbitrarily conceived. The first decision decided issues raised before benchmarking and concluded that SSA could properly conduct the benchmark as proposed. The second decision is rooted in the requirement that proposals must be evaluated in accord with the criteria stated in the solicitation, which in turn requires that a selection using numerical scores reflect a meaningful difference in the relative merit of the proposals evaluated. In the second decision, GAO found that several evaluation errors had caused SSA to view the difference between the costs of the protester's and the awardee's proposals as greater than was warranted. Therefore, the prior decision was affirmed.