Protests move forward for $1.5B DHS 'FLASH' contract

Several companies have made supplemental filings with the Government Accountability Office as they continue to pursue their protests of a $1.5 billion Homeland Security Department contract.

The DHS "FLASH" contract has become rather messy for the department.

In November, DHS first named 13 winners for the contract that would provide agile and other collaborative development services. That was met with protests and DHS pulled the awards back to take a corrective action.

Then in March, the agency made new awards but left off two of the original winners and none of the protesting firms were added.

So that set off another round of protests. Now that several of the companies have made supplemental filings with GAO, it looks like this one is headed toward a decision by GAO on the merits. Generally agencies take a corrective action within about 30 days of a protest. However, there is still a chance that DHS will take another corrective action as more data is gathered and try to make awards a third time.

This is a new vehicle for DHS so there are no incumbents. DHS developed it as part of a digital government strategy.

As it stands now, the winners are:

• Ad Hoc LLC
• Excella Consulting Inc.
• Innovations JV LLC
• Karsun Solutions
• LinkTec
• Navitas Business Consulting Inc.
• SemanticBits LLC
• SimonComputing Inc.
• Soft Tech Consulting Inc.
• Solution Technology Systems Inc.
• Wexler Technical Solutions Inc.

Companies with protests pending are:

• BC Digital Services LLC-JV
• Brillient Corp.
• Citizant Inc.
• Cybermedia Technologies Inc.
• EDC Consulting LLC
• Harmonia Holdings Group
• Incentive Technology Group
• IntegrityOne Partners
• Ventera Corp.

EDC Consulting was one of the two companies who won the contract when it was first awarded but was left off the second time. The other company, Emagine IT has not filed a protest.

A decision is due in late June.