Pre-award protests cleared in FBI's $7B IT services pact

The Government Accountability Office has denied the outstanding final protest against the FBI’s $7 billion ITSSS-2 pact, a move that clears the agency to make an award.

GAO denied a protest by Computer World Services Corp., which was eliminated from the competition. Other protests filed by SMX, General Dynamics IT, Ernst & Young and Qbase were dismissed earlier this year because the FBI had taken corrective actions.

But Computer World Services' protest remained open until Tuesday, when GAO ruled that the FBI was correct to reject that company's proposal.

The protest led the FBI to announce in February that it couldn’t award the IT Supplies and Support Service 2nd Generation blanket purchase agreement until late May.

The FBI said the company’s proposal did not follow the instructions in the solicitation. Computer World Services countered that the FBI didn’t follow the solicitation’s instructions. The company also argued that the solicitation was ambiguous.

But in siding with the FBI, GAO said Computer World Services based its arguments on an unreasonable reading of the solicitation.

More details are not available yet because a public version of the decision hasn’t been released.

ITSSS-2 will be a multiple-award blanket purchase agreement for a wide-range of IT services.

This might not be the last time we see protests involving this contract, which has a long history of pre-award troubles. The FBI first stood up the IT Enterprise Services Contract with the goal to award it in 2020.

Protests derailed that effort, which led the FBI to cancel it and then unveil ITSSS-2 in June 2023.