PilieroMazza successfully represented a protestor in challenging the General Services Administration’s (“GSA”) award of its $50 billion “Alliant” government-wide acquisition contract for the provision of a large percentage of the federal government’s information technology products and services for up to the next 10 years.   In overturning the award, the Court of Federal Claims agreed with the protesters’ arguments that the GSA’s decision was arbitrary and capricious.  Specifically, the court found that GSA’s decision was improper due to its (1) reliance on past performance surveys that were ill designed to solicit the actual information needed to perform a proper evaluation; (2) placing of undue significance on technical calculations that suffered from false precision; and (3) failing to conduct a proper price reasonableness analysis prior to making its award determinations.

First, the court, in agreeing with the protesters’ arguments, found that the offerors, especially the protesters, were treated unequally with regard to how their past performance was evaluated.  These uneven evaluations were due to the fact that the GSA asked questions of the offerors past performance references that were extremely generic.  Instead of asking references to give specific adjectival ratings (i.e., “excellent,” “very good,” etc.), the GSA’s questionnaires simply asked questions similar to “how was the contractors performance.”  The record before the court showed that some responses used the term “excellent,” some said “very well,” and still others said “phenomenal success.”  The problem the court found, however, was that those evaluating the questionnaires did not have any way of quantifying  what each response meant because the responses were so subjective.  One individuals could have said “excellent” and meant the same exact thing as the other individual that said “very well.”  Because it was impossible for the evaluators to objectively review these subjective responses, the court found that the GSA’s reliance upon those questionnaires was arbitrary and capricious. 

Next, the court agreed with the protesters’ arguments that the way GSA calculated the offerors’ numeric technical scores suffered from an unacceptable level of false precision.  Specifically, each of the GSA’s evaluators assigned an adjectival rating to each offeror for the various factors/subfactors.  Those adjectival ratings were then converted into a single digit numerical scores of 1 through 5.  By a process of averaging and re-averaging these single digit numerical scores, GSA created scores that, instead of being single digits, had precision down to the thousandths place (i.e., 4.225).  Because, as the court found, the rules of statistical accuracy state that mathematical calculations cannot create true precision, the court classified these averages as being falsely precise.  As such, it was arbitrary and capricious for the GSA to rely upon differences in the tenth, hundredth, or thousandths decimal place when ranking the offerors where the initial scores were merely single digits.  In effect, anything more precise than a single digit, without taking into account the significance, from a statistical perspective, of any additional digits to the right of the decimal point.

Lastly, and again finding merit in the protesters’ arguments, the court found that GSA failed to properly consider offerors’ prices when making its award determination.  The record before the court showed that some of the awardees had pricing that was more than 2 standard deviations both above and below the mean overall price among all offerors yet the GSA found all such pricing to be “reasonable.”  The court found a finding of reasonableness despite such wide deviations in price was arbitrary and capricious.

For all these reasons, the court overturned the awards made under the GWAC and ordered the GSA to perform a new evaluation.  As a result, the protester represented by PilieroMazza received one of the GSA “Alliant” contracts.