A solicitation misreading knocked these joint ventures out of OASIS+

A misreading of the solicitation knocked a pair of joint ventures out of the running for the General Services Administration’s OASIS+ vehicle.

Now a federal judge has said that even through scores of other companies made the same misreading, there was no ambiguity in the solicitation because the requirement was discussed fully during the question-and-answer phase.

CWS FMTI Joint Venture and Mainsail-OASIS JV went to the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in the summer after they were kicked out of the competition because they only submitting one qualifying project when the solicitation required two.

The joint ventures were competing for spots in the 8(a), HUBzone, women-owned and service-disabled/veteran-owned categories.

They argued that the section of the solicitation requiring one project from the protégé should supersede a more general provision that required two projects.

But the court rejected those arguments in a decision signed on Feb. 9 and released to the public on Tuesday.

Judge Molly Silfen said there was no ambiguity in the solicitation about the requirement for two projects.

“The agency underlined the word ‘and’ to emphasize that offerors needed to comply with both sets of requirements,” Silfen wrote in the decision.

The joint ventures also argued that GSA should have gone to the Small Business Administration for a certificate of competency before disqualifying them.

Silfen rejected that argument as well because SBA certification only goes to whether these are responsible companies.

“Responsibility is different from responsiveness to a solicitation,” she wrote. “GSA’s decision to disqualify plaintiffs from competition implicates not responsibility but plaintiffs’ responsiveness to the OASIS+ solicitation.”

The two joint ventures were not alone in their misinterpretation of the solicitation. GSA rejected 73 proposals for the same misunderstanding, but the judge said that does not matter.

The question about one or two projects also came up during Q&A portion ahead of the final solicitation. Basically, all of these companies should have known that GSA was looking for two projects.

That so many companies misread the solicitation was beside the point.

“Although others shared plaintiffs’ interpretation, a common misunderstanding does not necessarily render any ambiguity latent, particularly where prospective offerors asked ahead of time about the language at issue,” the judge wrote.

A few key takeaways are to read the fine print on socioeconomic set-aside requirements, as well as aggressively use and read the Q&A process.

Finally: when an agency uses the word “and,” it’s requiring what’s on both sides of that “and.”