In a recent decision, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) sustained, in part, a pre-award protest challenging the terms of a solicitation issued by the General Services Administration (GSA) for facility maintenance services. The protester, Wilson 5 Service Company, Inc. (Wilson 5), a small business, asserted that the solicitation unduly restricted competition because the agency would automatically view unfavorably and assign negative ratings to quotes that did not show prior experience at multiple facilities under a single contract with at least 200 miles between facilities. Wilson 5 asserted that the solicitation unreasonably penalized vendors with similar experience performing maintenance services at multiple facilities under several concurrent contracts. GAO agreed and determined GSA failed to establish why the performance of similar services at multiple facilities should be viewed differently when performed under a single contract versus multiple concurrent contracts. GAO similarly found that GSA failed to justify the basis for requiring a minimum of 200 miles between facilities when the majority of the agency’s facilities were less than 200 miles apart. Based on these findings, GAO partially sustained the protest, with a recommendation that GSA revise the solicitation and reimburse Wilson 5’s protest costs.

POV: Prospective offerors can successfully challenge solicitation terms that unduly restrict competition and effectively penalize offerors on arbitrary bases. Agencies must adequately justify solicitation terms that limit full and open competition and may not impose random requirements that restrict competition for no reason. In other words, it’s up to the agency to make sure its restrictive solicitation terms make sense, or else GAO will.