GAO clears the protest deck for $50B Army MAPS vehicle
Gettyimages.com/Anton Petrus
By
Nick Wakeman
The watchdog agency five remaining challenges, including a set of four that questioned the self-scoring process and consolidation of requirements for the professional services contract.
The Army has won out over the remaining protests surrounding its $50 billion MAPS professional services contract.
The Government Accountability Office has denied a final group of five challenges to the solicitation for the Army’s Marketplace for the Acquisition of Professional Services.
The protest by Cinteot was a standalone case. Kearney & Co., NextGen Federal Systems, Integral Federal and Alpha Tech Alliance were bundled into a single decision.
Only the Cinteot decision has been publicly released so far and that was unsealed Monday. The decision involving the other four is still going through GAO’s redaction process before the written decision publicly available.
Cinteot challenged the procurement process, the time given for responding to the solicitation amendments and raise allegations of a defective form.
One of Cinteot’s complaints about the procurement ws that instructions were not clear about how to score past performance examples as part of the self-scoring process. Even though several amendments slightly changed the scorecard, bidders still used a dropdown menu to pick an adjectival rating that translated into a numeric score.
The Army said, and GAO agreed, that it did not matter which scorecard bidders used. The score would remain the same.
On the other challenges, GAO found no grounds to rule in favor of Cinteot.
The four bundled protests challenged different aspects of the self-scoring process and the procurement as a whole.
These four companies also said the Army improperly consolidated requirements and the solicitation had ambiguities that prevented bidders from competing on a common basis. They also argued that requirements in the solicitation were unduly restrictive.
GAO denied all those challenges.
GAO made its decisions between Sept. 21 and Sept. 28, which clears the watchdog agency’s docket of MAPS protests.
Other earlier protests were dismissed by GAO and a challenge by Intelligence Consulting Enterprise Solutions was sustained. GAO told the Army to allow small business teams to submit proposals.
MAPS will become the Army’s primary contract for acquiring staff augmentation and technology support.
MAPS consolidates work that currently takes place under the Responsive Strategic Services Sourcing and Information Technology Enterprise Solution-3 Services vehicles.