Supreme Court ruling pays off with new awards for VA's $22.3B T4NG contract
By
Nick Wakeman
VA's $22.3 billion T4NG contract has cleared its protest hurdles and then some, with the agency adding three more winners to the pool in response to a Supreme Court ruling that it needs to give a preference to service-disabled, veteran-owned firms.
There are three service-disabled, veteran-owned small businesses that now hold spots on a $22.3 billion Veterans Affairs contract, and they have another small business that didn’t even bid to thank for it.
ProSphere Tek Inc., Insignia and Veterans EZ Info all failed to make the cut after VA first made awards for its Transformation Twenty-One Total Technology Program Next Generation or T4NG. ProSphere even went so far as to file a bid protest (along with several other companies) with the Government Accountability Office.
On July 1, GAO denied ProSphere’s protest, and you would think that it was over for the company after that.
But then about a week ago, VA called the three companies and told them they were being added to the contract.
VA’s change of heart was driven by a Supreme Court decision from June that said VA had to use the rule of two in its procurements. So,l if there were at least two service-disabled, veteran-owned small businesses that qualified for the work, then the contract must be set aside for them.
A ProSphere executive told me that VA said they were qualified for the work, so they had to be added.
The Supreme Court case involved a small service-disabled, veteran-owned company called Kingdomware that persevered through the Court of Federal Claims and the U.S. Court of Appeals, both of which said VA wasn’t required to make awards to SDVO companies.
They kept going and took their case to the Supreme Court where the decision in their favor was unanimous.
There are still some other service-disabled, veteran-owned companies that bid but haven’t been added to the T4NG contract, according to VA’s listing of the primes. No word from those companies on whether they expect to be added or not.
With the addition of ProSphere, Insiginia and Veteran EZ, the T4NG contract now has 27 primes, up from the 21 originally awarded in March.
As I said, VA was hit with several protests including from Top 100 companies HP Enterprise Services and CGI Federal.
HPES and CGI Federal had their protests dismissed when VA took corrective action that resulted in the companies being added to the list of winners
Although Leidos did not file a protest, they were also added onto the contract during the corrective action process.
Here is a list of the winners:
Large Businesses:
- Accenture Federal Services
- Booz Allen Hamilton
- By Light Professional IT Services Inc.
- CACI International
- CGI Federal
- HP Enterprise Services
- Information Innovators Inc.
- IBM Corp.
- Kforce Government Solutions Inc.
- Leidos
- SRA International Inc. (now known as CSRA)
- Systems Made Simple (SMS) (now part of Lockheed Martin and soon to be joining Leidos.)
Service disabled, veteran-owned businesses:
- AbleVets LLC
- B3 Group Inc.
- Business Information Technology Solutions Inc.
- Favor TechConsulting LLC
- Halfaker & Associates LLC
- HMS Technologies LLC
- Insignia
- Intelligent Waves LLC
- Liberty IT Solutions LLC
- Nester Consulting LLC, dba GovernmentCIO
- ProSphere Tek Inc.
- TISTA Science and Technology Corp.
- Veterans EZ Info
Small businesses:
- The Informatics Applications Group Inc.
- Ellumen Inc.
All of the protests have been resolved, so the contract is open for business. One outstanding item at GAO is a request from CGI that they be reimbursed for the costs of their bid protest, but that doesn’t impact the contract moving forward.
For ProSphere, Insignia and Veterans EZ, they should send a nice thank you note to Kingdomware thanking them for their persistence. Without it, they’d be on the outside looking in.
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