Troubles continue for DHS' ITOSS contract

The Homeland Security Department’s $200 million "ITOSS" contract should be a marquee small business win and potential game changer for whoever wins.

But DHS apparently has been making mistake after mistake in getting the contract out the door and that is what is holding things up.

So far, there have been 29 protest filings at the Government Accountability Office involving multiple companies. And that doesn’t count two filings where companies are trying to recoup the cost of filing their protests.

The IT Operations Support Services contract is a consolidation of several contracts into a single, small business award.

Six months ago, I reported that DHS would go back to the drawing board for ITOSS after GAO ruled against DHS on three separate bid protests. What’s significant and says a lot about DHS’ challenges with this contract is that GAO didn’t bundle the decisions into one.

Each of three protestors -- 360 IT Integrated Solutions, VariQ Corp. and Ace Info Solutions -- found different problems with how DHS was conducting the competition.

GAO told DHS to re-evaluate proposals and make sure those evaluations were consistent with the solicitation.

DHS apparently has done that, because lo and behold more protests have since arrived to GAO. VariQ, Innovative Solutions and 360 IT have filed protests since the start of December.

These protests will be the fourth round of protests that ITOSS has faced. The first two rounds resulted in DHS pulling awards back to try again. The third round resulted in the GAO decisions that went against DHS in June.

A GAO decision on this fourth round is due March 22, 2019.

DHS first tried to make an ITOSS award in the fall of 2017 when it named Inserso Corp. as the prime. Since then it has been nothing but bid protests and repeated attempts to make an award.

Looks like we’ll be well into next year before this one is solved.