Link: GAO Opinion
Agency: Department of the Army
Disposition: Protest denied.
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GAO Digest:
Protest is denied where protester fails to demonstrate that agency’s evaluation of proposal as technically marginal with moderate risk and agency’s exclusion of proposal from revised competitive range on that basis were unreasonable.
General Counsel P.C. Highlight:
Orion protests the exclusion of its proposal from the revised competitive range, alleging that its initial proposal was rated the same as the proposals submitted by Offeror A and Offeror B. GAO states that it is well settled that an agency is not required to retain in the competitive range a proposal that is not among the most highly rated or that the agency otherwise reasonably concludes has no realistic prospect of award.
Here, the Army has responded to the protest, providing detailed evaluation documentation that it maintains reasonably establishes why Orion’s proposal was excluded from the revised competitive range. None of the evaluation findings and conclusions was refuted by the protester. Rather, Orion merely reiterates the position stated in its protest, namely, that the agency should have included its proposal in the revised competitive range because its rating was almost identical to the other two offerors’ proposals. GAO reviewed the record with respect to the protester’s allegations and fould no basis to question either the agency’s evaluation conclusions or the decision to exclude the protester’s proposal from the revised competitive range based on those evaluation findings. In short, the record shows that the agency’s evaluation of Orion’s proposal identified a significant number of deficiencies in the proposal (10) compared to one deficiency each in the proposals that were included in the revised competitive range. In addition, both proposals included in the competitive range were assessed as presenting low performance risk, while Orion’s proposal was assessed as presenting moderate risk. These two differences alone lead us to conclude that the agency reasonably distinguished between the protester’s proposal, and the proposals of the other two offerors included in the competitive range, in making its revised competitive range determination. The protest is denied.