Protest Alleging Improper Evaluation of Proposals

A firm protested the award of a Navy contract for engineering and technical support services to a competitor. The firm complained that the Navy did not evaluate proposals as required by the request for proposals, but substituted price instead as the principal award criterion. Although the incumbent protester was assigned a 15 percent better technical score than the awardee, the protester's proposal price was almost 71 percent higher. The evaluators, finding little difference between the technical qualifications of the two firms, concluded that the protester's higher score reflected its experience as the incumbent and felt that the awardee would gain equivalent experience in a short time. The protest was denied. GAO held that notwithstanding the protester's higher initially evaluted technical score, selection officials properly determined that the higher score did not reflect a significant difference in technical merit to warrant acceptance of the higher cost associated with it. The protester also complained that the Navy unnecessarily delayed before submitting its report to GAO. Believing that 25 working days should have been sufficient, GAO concurred that there was no justifiable reason for a delay of over 2 months before the report from the Navy was received. However, the agency's delay in submitting the report to GAO would not justify disregarding the substantive information contained in the report. Accordingly, the protest was denied.