Court order pauses $1.5B Commerce enterprise IT contract

The Commerce Department’s potential $1.5 billion enterprise IT services contract continues to be mired in protests by unhappy bidders.

Several companies first took their challenges to the Court of Federal Claims in October, complaining about the way the department conducted evaluations for the Commerce Acquisition for Transformational Technology Services vehicle.

Commerce structured CATTS as a multiple-award, small business set-aside contract and picked 15 winners for it in September.

On Tuesday, the court ruled Commerce's award decisions were “arbitrary and capricious" and ordered a pause on work being done under the contract.

The court also told Commerce that if it wants to move ahead with the contract, it must “at a minimum” re-evaluate the technical proposals of four companies – Ekagra, CAN Softtech, Syneren and JCS Solutions.

Further details of the court’s ruling have not been released yet, but this appears to put Commerce back to the stage of having to evaluate proposals again. It isn’t clear yet if Commerce will be asking for revised proposals from all bidders.

At a minimum, it seems that Commerce needs to better document its award decisions in order to avoid the “arbitrary and capricious” label.

A second wrinkle is that Syneren filed a new lawsuit at the court on Tuesday, the same day the court ruled in its favor. It is still sealed, so details aren’t available.

We’ve reached out to their attorney and will update this post if we get a comment back.

Meanwhile, it looks like Commerce has a lot of work to do.