Multimax protests $20B Army ITES-2S contract

Multimax filed a protest with the Government Accountability Office against award of the $20 billion Army Information Technology Enterprise Solutions 2 Services (ITES-2S) contract, and industry sources said the deal has been hit with up to four other protests.

In its filing, Multimax said the Army’s award of ITES-2S to a field of 11 bidders was “fatally flawed” because it did not adhere to the request for proposals (RFP) that specified that four small businesses would receive an award.

Instead, Multimax, a small business, said the Army made only two small-business awards and another to an unidentified company that represented itself as a small business.

Apptis, STG and QSS won ITES-2S small-business contracts. Booz Allen Hamilton, CACI-ISS, Computer Sciences Corp., EDS, General Dynamics, IBM, Lockheed Martin Integrated Systems and Science Applications International Corp. won the ITES-2S large business contracts.

Although ITES-2S RFP states that the awards would be made on the basis of best value to the Army and other factors not based on price, Multimax alleged in its filing that the service selected winners primarily on the basis of price for the five-year indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contact.

Price information Multimax’s law firm, Cohen Mohr, filed with GAO shows that the 11 ITES-2S contact winners bid within a narrow range of just less than $13 billion to just more than $14 billion. Booz Allen was the low bidder at $12.89 billion, according to the filing, while General Dynamics was the high bidder at $14.4 billion.

Multimax said in its filing that EDS, the third-highest bidder at $14.1 billion, won an award even though it scored lowest of all awardees on the performance risk assessment.

The protest temporarily halts any work on ITES-2S, which the Army wants to use to support Army enterprise IT systems worldwide.

This includes support of Army combat systems, including command, control, communications and computers, and business systems. A spokesman for the Army Program Executive Office for Enterprise Information Systems did not return calls for comment as of deadline.

In what appears to be a related development, the Army indefinitely postponed the industry day for its $10 billion ITES-2 hardware contract originally scheduled for next week.