OASIS large-biz contract gets first protests

Four protests have been filed with the Government Accountability Office over the large business portion of the $60 billion OASIS contract.

The General Services Administration awarded contracts to 74 companies to provide high-end professional services through the contract. Earlier, it had made awards to 124 small businesses.

The large business protesters are:

• Aljucar, Anvil-Incus & Co.
• VSE Corp.
• American Systems Corp.
• Logistics Management Institute

Aljucar, Anvil-Incus actually is a law firm representing small business interests. The firm filed several protests during the pre-award stage, arguing that GSA’s handling of past performance references was unfair to small businesses forming joint ventures solely to pursue OASIS. It lost those protests.

Logistics Management Institute actually won a spot on one of the six pools under OASIS, so it looks like they are protesting because they submitted proposals for other pools but were rejected.

I expect we’ll see the bulk of protests getting filed this week as GSA didn’t conduct face-to-face debriefs, but instead provided written debriefs with its notification to losing bidders.

If the 10-day clock began ticking with those written debriefs, then the window for filing a protest will close in the next couple because the awards were made May 19.

So far, GSA seems to be pretty confident in its award decisions, and it looks like it is going to see through to the end the remaining bid protests filed with GAO for the small business portion of the contract vehicle.

We’ll have to wait and see what the result will be and if there are more than four protesters of the large business contract.