Request for Reconsideration

A firm requested reconsideration of a previous decision which denied its protest concerning a request for proposals (RFP) issued by the Federal Railroad Administration. The protester contended that: (1) the agency did not adhere to the stated RFP evaluation criteria in making an award to an offeror whose proposal had not received the highest technical score and whose technical and cost relationship was not the most advantageous to the Government, and (2) the narrative analysis portion of the agency's technical evaluation report to the source selection official contradicted the prior conclusion of GAO that it was not unreasonable for the source selection official to make the award to take advantage of the awardee's lower cost. The protester asserted that, had the contracting agency adhered to the criteria of the RFP, it would have received the award since its final technical score was nearly 15 percent higher than the awardee's score and there was only a 2.9 percent difference in evaluated costs between the two companies. GAO held that whether a given point score variance between two competing proposals indicates a significant superiority of one over the other depends on all the facts and circumstances of each procurement. Since the technical report clearly showed that both firms would be able to perform the contract with little difficulty, GAO held that it was acceptable under RFP requirements for the contracting agency to make award to the second-ranked offeror, the awardee, to take advantage of that offeror's lower cost. Accordingly, the previous denial of the protest was affirmed since the protester presented no evidence or argument demonstrating any error of fact or law in the previous decision.