Protest season opens for OASIS

The protest season is officially open for GSA’s OASIS contract. Ten companies so far have filed protests because they were not included in the pool of 123 contracts that went to small businesses.

OASIS is GSA’s 10-year, $60 billion contract for high-end professional services. So far GSA has only awarded contracts for the small-business portion of the contract.

Awards to large businesses are expected by the end of the month or very early in April.

It’s no surprise that protests have been filed. They are a familiar part of the landscape these days, particularly with these large, governmentwide task order contracts.

The ten protestors so far are:

• North Star Group LLC: Filed Feb. 28. Decision due June 9.
• ADNET Systems Inc.: Filed Feb. 28. Decision due June 9.
• Futron Inc.: Filed March 4. Decision due June 12.
• OST Inc.: Filed March 4. Decision due June 12.
• Planned Systems International: Filed March 5. Decision due June 13.
• Gauss Management Research & Engineering Inc.: Filed March 5. Decision due June 13.
• Enterprise Information Systems: Filed March 6. Decision due June 16.
• Technical Professional Services: Filed March 6. Decision due June 16.
• Innovim LLC: Filed March 6. Decision due June 16.
• Unified Business Technologies: Filed March 6. Decision due June 16.
• Integral Consulting Services: Filed March 6. Decision due June 16.

Generally, these kinds of protests include an automatic stay, which would stop GSA from proceeding with task orders under the contract.

What happens from here will depend on GSA. The agency can decide to fight the protests, which means the soonest the resolution can come is June after GAO makes its decision. But a June resolution in this case would mean that GAO ruled in favor of GSA.

GSA also has the choice to withdraw its awards and re-evaluate the bids, which would also add several months to the contract getting off the ground. And unless the re-evaluation results in awards to all bidders, GSA would still be open to protests.

If GAO rules against GSA, the delays could be even longer, depending on what GAO wants GSA to do.

So, the best-case scenario is that the protests are resolved by June, and the worst case is that it’ll be late summer or the fall before everything is resolved.

We’ll know more in about 30 days, which is the deadline for GSA to file its response. If GSA decides to pull back awards and re-evaluate bids, GAO will dismiss the protests.

"GSA is confident that the OASIS [small business] award protests filed with GAO and GSA will be dismissed or resolved in a timely fashion," a spokeswoman said in a statement. "And that the agency will be able to issue notices to proceed for the pools affected by protests as soon as is possible."

We should also expect protests of the large business awards once they come out.

The merry-go-round just keeps on turning.