CIO-SP4 lawsuits continue to pile up

The $50 billion CIO-SP4 contract has drawn more protesters at the U.S. Court of Federal Claims as four more companies have joined the fray this week.

Eight companies in total have now filed lawsuits and their cases are likely to be consolidated into one. While three different law firms are involved, all of the cases have been assigned to the same judge.

The attorney for the most recent two protesters to file has asked that they be consolidated because their lawsuits all deal with the CIO-SP4 vehicle coming out of the National Institutes of Health's IT Acquisition and Assessment Center.

The eight protesters are:

• Analytica
• Futron
• HagerV3
• Inalab Consulting
• Mission 1st Group
• Objective Function Systems
• RCHP
• VetsConnect

All of the complaints are currently sealed, so we don't yet have details on their objections to CIO-SP4. It could be several weeks before public versions of the filings are released.

But we can tell you that none of those eight were among the hundreds of protesters who filed objections to CIO-SP4 last year. Those protests focused primarily on NITAAC’s self-scoring methodology and the threshold bidders had to reach in order to move from phase one of the competition to phase two

To address those complaints, NITAAC took several corrective actions before stepping back in September to adjust its approach and allow bidders to use requirements contracts as examples of their experience.

Preliminary award notices started going out again in January, which kicked off a round of protests. Some filed at GAO were withdrawn, but then lawsuits started to hit the court.

We’ve reached out to the companies for comments but have received no response.

We’ll continue to monitor the court docket and post updates when filings are unsealed or other actions are taken.