GSA oversight of contractor flawed

The General Services Administration did not follow established policies and procedures when it hired a contractor to evaluate the past performance of companies bidding on the agency's Alliant contract, according to an inspector general report released this week.

Comment on this article in The Forum.The IG report concluded that GSA's Federal Acquisition Service failed to make sure the government received the best value among proposals when it hired Calyptus Consulting Group to evaluate past performance data for the 62 companies bidding on the $50 billion, 10-year governmentwide information technology contract. GSA hired Calyptus for $242,400 to conduct more than 2,000 interviews and background checks of those companies competing for Alliant.

GSA paid Calyptus without ever receiving validation documents, leaving "no assurance that [the] contractor performed the work for which the government paid," said the report. The IG also noted that the agency relied on Calyptus' past performance data in awarding the Alliant contract without ensuring the information was valid and accurate.

In 2007, 62 companies submitted bids for the Alliant contract and 29 were selected as service providers. But soon after the agency awarded the contract, eight companies filed a protest, arguing the process used to evaluate the bids violated the law.

The IG's recent finding reinforces a March 2008 court ruling related to the case. At that time, Judge Francis Allegra from the U.S. Court of Federal Claims ruled that the criteria used to evaluate the Alliant proposals was "arbitrary and capricious," and he ordered GSA to reevaluate all the Alliant bids, this time taking price into account.

In fact, Calyptus' price for conducting the evaluation was significantly higher than the other proposals, according to the report.

"Considering that Calyptus' price was 36 percent higher than the next proposal, and the documentation does not indicate that the required analysis was performed, there is concern whether the government needed to pay a premium for this work," the report stated.

The IG blamed the contracting officer's "lack of application of the correct [Federal Acquisition Regulation] criteria," as well as insufficient training in contract administration.

In his March decision, Allegra pointed out that Calyptus' process of assigning quantitative ratings to verbal answers was problematic, and that GSA had relied almost exclusively on those ratings to award the contract, resulting in lower-priced vendors being eliminated from consideration. He ruled that the data provided by Calyptus was flawed and barred GSA from using that data during the subsequent reevaluation.

GSA said it is currently evaluating all bids in-house and hopes to award the contract in early 2009.