Booz Allen continues protest campaign with fight for $182.4M contract

Booz Allen Hamilton is crying foul over a $182.4 million contract award that went to CACI International to provide the Naval Sea Systems Command with acquisition, budget and other support.

CACI won the contract under the Navy’s Seaport-e contract on Sept. 30. Booz filed its protest Oct. 15.

The incumbent on the contract is BAE Systems, but that company hasn’t filed a bid protest yet. Depending on when the company was debriefed, the window for a protest is likely still open.

The contract has four primary areas for support services: integrated logistics and acquisition support; budget and financial support; operations and administration support; and systems engineering and technical assistance.

With this protest, Booz Allen now has four active protests on file at the Government Accountability Office.

It is one of several large companies protesting the Air Force NetCents 2 Application Services awards.

The company also has protests pending at the FBI and Army.

Similar to SRA International, which I wrote about yesterday, Booz Allen has been very active with protests this year. Counting the four protests still pending, Booz Allen has protested 17 contracts in the last 12 months.

Of those, the company withdrew one protest and had three protests denied by GAO. Nine protests were dismissed, which generally means the agency involved took some sort of corrective action, such as re-evaluating the award decision.

Since none of these contracts came back as a new protest, Booz Allen most likely was satisfied with the corrective action, so I would score those as a victory.

Some commenters on my blog looking at SRA’s bid said I failed to consider that the deeper pockets of larger businesses means they can mount these relentless protest battles. But smaller businesses do not have the resources.

That’s a good point, and one I wish I had made. The system does seem to favor larger businesses.

But I think my premise remains valid: The growth of bid protests points to more of a problem on the government side of the equation than the industry side.