Biggest Contract Wins Come With Expectation of a Loser’s Protest

Jay Carey was quoted by Bloomberg Government in an article covering the downward trend in the number of bid protests at the Government Accountability Office (GAO) over the last decade, while the while the effectiveness of protests has jumped. Jay identified a number of factors driving these trends.

“Generally, anytime that you get one of these contracts that is in the tens of billions of dollars, it is very, very likely to be protested," he said.

Jay continued, stating, “GAO actually gets a lot of protests from very small businesses about very, very small procurements, and I suspect that that filing fee had the effect of cutting back on some degree on that universe of very, very small protests."

He mentioned that two additional factors could be an increase in mergers and acquisitions reducing the pool of potential protesters and more use of indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contracts. “A company might lose a task order, but it usually knows that there are going to be more task orders down the road, and so it doesn’t have that same winner-take-all quality to it that really motivates protests,” he said.

Meanwhile, companies have become more judicious in filing protests, and are “therefore, being successful more often,” Jay concluded.

Read the full article here.