Protests on $7.8B SSA IT contract headed for January resolution

The protest process continues to grind forward for the Social Security Administration’s $7.8 billion IT Support Services Contract.

SSA awarded the contract in August to Leidos, Northrop Grumman and CGI Federal. But work under the contract has been stalled because losing bidders CSRA, Accenture, DXC Technology and IBM all filed protests. Booz Allen Hamilton also filed a protest but withdrew it even before the agency responded to it.

But the others are going ahead full bore as CSRA has filed five supplemental protests since theoriginal protest. It's most recent filing was Tuesday.

There are typically a lot of exchanges of documents during a protest. Supplemental protests are generally filed after a company learns something new and wants to add it to the case.

Accenture and DXC have only filed one supplemental protest each. IBM has not filed any.

GAO still expects to make a decision by Jan. 5 but the pleadings apparently are flying back-and-forth between the agency, GAO and the protesting companies.

In their original protests, the companies claimed that if the evaluation had been done properly they would have been picked.

A source told me that SSA also may have inadvertently invited the protests because it had told bidders that it planned to make five awardds but then only made three.

The contract stretches out for up to 10 years and each winning company received a slightly different ceiling with $2.3 billion for Leidos, $2.4 billion for CGI and then $3.1 billion for Northrop.

Leidos -- through its Lockheed Martin IT business acquisition -- and Northrop are incumbents on the existing contract. Accenture and CSRA also are incumbents.

This is an important vehicle for SSA as the agency wants to use it for new hardware and software to improve customer services and to automate existing IT systems as they are updated.