Link: GAO Opinion
Agency: Department of the Army
Disposition: Protest dismissed.
Keywords: Delivery order jurisdiction
General Counsel P.C. Highlight: Protester that holds the same ID/IQ contract as the awardee may not protest the award of a delivery order under the ID/IQ as being outside of the scope of that same ID/IQ contract because they were not locked out of the original competition.
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LaBarge Products, Inc. protested the Department of the Army’s issuance of a delivery order for fuel and water pump assemblies, valued at a little over $2 million, to DRS Sustainment Systems, Inc., alleging that the pumps quoted by the winning vendor would not meet the delivery order specifications and that the Army impermissibly changed the scope of the underlying indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity (ID/IQ) contract. In its protest, LaBarge acknowledged that the delivery order was valued at less than $10 million, but still asserted that GAO had jurisdiction because it claimed that the delivery order impermissibly expanded the scope of the underlying contract.
GAO does not have jurisdiction to consider award of a task order under an ID/IQ contract (not including GSA Schedule contracts), except where (1) it is valued in excess of $10 million, or (2) where the protester argues that the task order is outside the scope of the underlying ID/IQ contract. Since the task order at issue was $2 million, the first exception for task order jurisdiction is not available to the protester.
The protester argued that GAO had jurisdiction to consider its protest because it protested that the task order exceeded the scope of the underlying ID/IQ contract. Before addressing the merits of LaBarge’s protest, GAO noted that LaBarge held exactly the same ID/IQ contract involved in this award. GAO noted that LaBarge had been involved in the task order competition that resulting in the award to DRS. GAO held that “outside the scope” task order protests are not available to holders of the underlying ID/IQ contract who had an opportunity to compete for the award. GAO noted that the “outside the scope” jurisdiction is available only to those who had been closed out of the competition by not having the appropriate ID/IQ contract but would have competed for the award if the order had been subject to full and open competition.