How TRANSCOM went with a newcomer for $108M contract
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By
Nick Wakeman
A newly-released bid protest decision describes KPMG's capture of the award and how incumbency alone doesn't guarantee contract retention, as Ernst & Young found out.
Ernst & Young apparently did not do enough to distinguish its proposal for a $107.8 million award covering contract support services to Transportation Command.
Despite being the incumbent, EY lost the competition to KPMG.
In its protest, EY argued that TRANSCOM failed to assign the firm's proposal strengths in several areas that the company considered as differentiators.
TRANSCOM said its evaluators looked at those technical factors as meeting the requirements of the solicitation, but not as factors that exceeded what the RFP asked for, according to a bid protest decision unsealed Monday.
EY said it developed its risk management framework under the incumbent contract. As EY saw it, any other prime would need to start at the “developmental stage” and would not be able to implement systems on day one of the contract.
But TRANSCOM said that position is incorrect because the command owns the framework developed for it by E&Y and could simply give it to the new contractor.
The Government Accountability Office sided with TRANSCOM, because EY did not show evidence that the command made mistakes.
“A protester’s disagreement with the agency’s judgment, without more, is not sufficient to establish that an agency acted unreasonably,” GAO wrote.
GAO also disagreed with EY’s assertion that it should have been awarded strengths from its incumbent status.
“There is generally no requirement that a vendor be given additional credit for its status as an incumbent,” according to GAO.
The message from this decision is quite clear: Incumbents can't and shouldn't rest on their laurels.
The contract was competed as a task order under the OASIS vehicle, so EY can't take its protest further.