The Verdict is in; More Awards are Protested but Less Protests are Sustained
January 28th, 2010 | Posted by Thomas Marcinko
According to the statistics recently released by the General Accounting Office (GAO), 1,989 protests were filed in calendar year 2009, a 20% increase over 2008. Some have conjectured that the economy has motivated more losing bidders to file protests. However a significant part of the increase is due to changes in the regulations which allow different types of procurements to be protested to GAO. Protests involving task order awards, A-76 outsourcing decisions, and Transportation Security Administration procurements accounted for a large percentage of the increase.
Though the number of protests are up, the percentage of protests sustained by GAO actually decreased. GAO decided 18% of the protests in favor of the protested, compared to 21% in 2008. This is a sign the increase in protests is not attributable to an increase in poorly conducted procurements. Of course, a protest can be beneficial to contractors even if they don’t technically win. Often incumbent contractors protest and are able to continue work on their contract while the protest is being decided. That can result in months of additional revenue and profit even if they ultimately lose the protest.
This entry was posted on Thursday, January 28th, 2010 at 12:25 pm and is filed under FAR Regulations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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