Protest of Contract Award

A firm protested the award of contract by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) for the procurement of 11 data communications processing systems. The protester contended that the initial proposal submitted by the awardee was substantially deficient and technicaly unacceptable. The proposal allegedly did not meet mandatory requirements in the request for proposals (RFP) regarding detection and automatic recovery from a power failure. The protester believed that the proposal should have been rejected as outside the competitive range and that IRS should not have allowed the awardee to revise its is an effort to make it acceptable. A contracting officer's decision to include a proposal in the competitive range is a matter of administrative discretion. The evaluation of proposals is the function of the procuring agency and GAO review is limited to examining whether the agency's evaluation was fair and reasonable and consistent with the stated evaluation criteria. GAO agreed with the protester that IRS improperly accepted the awardee's proposal because the proposal did not meet the mandatory RFP requirement for detection and automatic recovery from a power failure. In spite of this, GAO did not recommend that the contract be terminated. It appeared that the system proposed by the awardee would meet the actual needs of IRS. Further, the protest was based on the fact that the awardee did not comply with the RFP, not that the protester would have offered something else if it had known of the changed requirement. The protest was denied.