Rule: Although the government must accept a late bid if it causes a delay, bidder responsibility for the delay is also a factor.

It’s every vendor’s worse nightmare: spending time preparing a bid only to miss the submission deadline. It can happen on any competition, including competitions worth $40 billion, as seen from a recent decision by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). The decision contains an excellent explanation of how the late bid rules work

RULE: An agency must have a reasonable basis for cancelling a solicitation.

Although lower prices and increased competition may justify cancelling a solicitation and starting over, these two rationales must be justified. And the paperwork supporting the decision must be credible. An agency ran into these problems recently in trying to cancel a solicitation.

RULE: Despite what a contracting officer and a contractor claim was said at a debriefing, the focus of a protest is the evaluation record, not the debriefing. 

Contracting officers and contractors often have an unrealistic view of a debriefing. Both have misconceptions about the power of an agency’s debriefing of an unsuccessful offeror in making it easier to initiate a bid protest. Unfortunately for both the government and industry–and for the procurement process in general--these misconceptions often hide the real value of a debriefing: establishing a better relationship between buyer and seller.

RULE: Price reasonableness and price realism, although sounding similar, are different concepts in procurement.

Some key procurement terms can be difficult to understand because the terms sound similar but involve different aspects of procurement: for example, “responsibility” and “responsiveness,” or “price reasonableness” and “price realism.” A recent GAO decision helps in distinguishing between price reasonableness and price realism. Although both terms involve analyzing an offeror’s price proposal, each looks at something significantly different