Protest of Decision To Permit Correction of Mistake in Bid

A firm protested the Department of the Interior's decision to permit the low bidder to correct an alleged mistake in its bid after bid opening. The protester contended that there was a strong possibility that the low bidder fabricated new estimating worksheets to prove a mistake and thereby increase its low bid to an amount just below that of the protester, the second low bidder. A firm that requests correction of its bid based on an error alleged after bid opening but prior to award must submit clear and convincing evidence that an error has been made, the manner in which the error occurred, and the intended bid price. Since the authority to correct such mistakes has been delegated to the procuring agency and, because the weight to be given to the evidence in support of an alleged mistake is a question of fact, GAO will not disturb the decision of the agency's evaluator unless the decision has no reasonable basis. Upon inspection of the low bidder's work papers and review of the Interior's analysis of the mistake claim, GAO believed the Interior determination to permit upward modification of the low bidder's corrected bid was reasonable. In addition, GAO found nothing unreasonable or dilatory in the amount of time it took the low bidder to allege a mistake after bid opening. Furthermore, the low bidder submitted the evidence supporting its claim less than 2 days after the Interior requested it. Concerning the protester's complaint that allowing correction of a low bid to an amount close to the next low bid encourages unethical conduct, the requirement that corrections be limited to those cases where the evidence clearly and convincingly establishes the existence of a mistake serves as a safeguard against this type of abuse. The closer an asserted intended bid is to the next low bid, the more difficult it is to establish that the amount claimed clearly was the bid actually intended. For that reason, correction is often disallowed where a corrected bid would come too close to the next low bid. However, the low bidder's corrected bid was nearly 4 percent less than the protester's second low bid, and GAO found no basis to conclude that the evidence was fabricated. Accordingly, the protest was denied.