Link: GAO Opinion
Agency: Department of the Navy
Disposition: Protest denied.
General Counsel P.C. Highlight:
GAO denied the protest of Kollsman Inc., an Elbit Systems of America, LLC company, based on the award of a contract to L-3 Communications Corporation, by the Department of the Navy, Naval Surface Warfare Center, Crane, Indiana (NSWC Crane) under a request for proposals (RFP) for handheld laser markers.
The RFP was for the award of a five-year indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract, with fixed unit prices. Proposals were to be evaluated based on technical, past performance and price factors. Past performance was to be evaluated to determine the relevancy of its referenced prior contracts, and assessed as either “relevant” or “not relevant.” L-3 was originally offered the contract after being the lower-priced proposal. L-3 and Kollsman received the same rating under the past performance factor. Kollsman filed a protest, which was sustained because the Navy failed to support and document its past performance evaluation of L-3.
The Navy then reevaluated L-3’s past performance based on five sources of information: (1) the past performance information retrieval system and the excluded parties list; (2) information from the awardee’s proposal; (3) the awardee’s CPARs; (4) the awardee’s past performance questionnaires; and (5) the preaward survey. The Navy ultimately found that L-3’s proposal presented the best value to the government and made award again to L-3 despite finding performance problems in the reevaluation.
Kollsman again protests the Navy’s evaluation of L-3’s past performance where the reevaluation constituted a “whitewash” of the record concerning L-3’s performance problems. GAO, as an initial matter, stated that Kollsman never meaningfully disputed the details of the reevaluation, but merely argued that the evaluation was unreasonable because the agency should have given more weight to the problems, and less weight to the corrective measures taken by L-3. However, the record showed that the agency issued a positive past performance rating based on three past contracts with positive feedback and only one that reflected performance problems. The agency also found that L-3’s corrective actions mitigated any concerns it may have had regarding L-3’s performance.