In a recent decision, the U.S. Court of Federal Claims denied a protest challenging the Central Intelligence Agency’s award of an approximately $115 million contract to Patriot Group International, Inc. (PGI) to provide international tactical and non-tactical medical support services. The protester, Assessment and Training Solutions Consulting Corp. (ATSC) challenged the agency’s award to PGI on the grounds that PGI’s proposal violated the solicitation’s font-size restrictions, thereby giving PGI an unfair advantage and rendering its proposal ineligible for award. The solicitation generally required that text be formatted with a minimum size of 12-point font but allowed a minimum size of 8-point font for illustrative exhibits, including tables, charts, graphs, and figures. ATSC asserted that PGI sought to circumvent the solicitation’s font-size restrictions by including a vast amount of text in tables and charts in the smaller, 8-point size font. ATSC previously raised the same objection in a protest filed at the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), where GAO concluded the solicitation did not preclude offerors from including narrative text in figures, tables, or other illustrative exhibits. Unlike GAO, the Court agreed with ATSC that the solicitation did not permit an offeror to take narrative proposal text that should be in 12-point font and simply format it in a table or chart in a smaller font size to increase the volume of information provided in its proposal. But the Court also found that ATSC had similarly used at least one table in its proposal that included narrative text in the smaller font, such that ATSC committed the same alleged violation of the solicitation’s requirements.  Although ATSC did this to a lesser degree than PGI, the Court nevertheless determined that ATSC either waived its argument or was not prejudiced by PGI’s violation. As a result, the Court entered judgment in favor of the agency and upheld the contract award to PGI. 

POV: A protester asserting that the contract awardee violated the solicitation’s formatting requirements must make sure that its own proposal complies with those same requirements. A protester seeking to challenge an awardee’s proposal formatting violation will not be able to show prejudice if the protester employed the same formatting violation, even if to a lesser degree. In other words, as the Court explained: “Plaintiffs may throw stones from their glass houses, as it were, but – as with the cliché about the pot and the kettle – it is a losing strategy.”