BDO earns another shot at TRANSCOM audit support work

BDO USA is still in the running for a contract to support financial and audit operations for the U.S. Transportation Command.

This one has a couple twists and turns before we even get to how BDO prevailed its protest.

For starters, this is BDO’s second protest involving this contract. In September, GAO denied BDO’s protest. The agency had rejected its proposals because its CAGE (commercial and government entity) code didn’t match the code in its GSA professional services schedule contract.

GAO upheld DISA’s decision to exclude BDO. But after that decision, DISA cancelled the solicitation on Nov. 1, 2018, because none of the bidders submitted proposals that DISA deemed to be compliant.

So that’s one twist.

The next twist? On Jan. 2, 2019, DISA reissued the solicitation with no changes and notified bidders that they could submit new proposals. BDO did this and included what it felt was the right CAGE code and it was the same CAGE code as in BDO’s professional services schedule contract.

And again, TRANSCOM found BDO non-compliant and rejected its proposal. This time it said that the CAGE code didn’t have a facilities clearance attached to the code. TRANSCOM said that if BDO was going to claim to have a multi-facilities clearance it would need a clearance for its headquarters.

BDO argued that the facilities clearance already applied to the company and wasn’t held by separate business units or subsidiaries. The clearance should have been found compliant.

GAO agreed and sustained BDO’s protest. It also found that TRANSCOM had been inconsistent in how it applied this requirement. In fact, TRANSCOM shared with BDO examples of task orders with facilities clearance requirements where the CAGE code didn’t match the contract.

GAO told TRANSCOM to re-evaluate BDO’s proposal and reinstate it for the competition. Or it needs to better document why the proposal failed to comply. I don’t think they can do that given what GAO found.

So BDO is back in the race for the $13.5 million contract. We’ll have to watch and see if more twists are on the way.