Nine Tenths of Your Price Was Already Filled In

The Army ran a best-value competition for petroleum facilities maintenance, collected four proposals, rated all four identically on every non-price factor, and then awarded on price alone.

The winning bid was $48,781,556. Of that, $44,363,415 was a number the Army had already typed into the pricing worksheet.

Offerors were instructed not to price it.

"If nine tenths of the evaluated price is filled in before anyone bids, what is actually being competed?"

GAO answered on Sept. 9 and released the redacted decision Thursday.

Two protests came out of this award, one denied and one dismissed, and between them they shut every route a losing offeror has against a low bid on a contract shaped this way.

What the Worksheet Did

The competition is RFP W912DY26RA002, USACE, preventive and corrective maintenance of petroleum facilities and systems, carried on SAM as "Fuels South Atlantic Division - Army". NAICS 561210, FAR part 15, fixed price, 3.5 years on a 12-month base with two 12-month options and a 6-month option.

The pricing worksheet split the work in two.

Preventive maintenance ran across CLINs X001 through X007, which offerors priced themselves. Corrective maintenance sat alone in CLIN X004, and the Army filled that one in at $44,363,415 under an instruction in capitals: "INSTRUCTIONS--DO NOT PRICE."

That figure went into every offeror's total. Same number, every bid.

So the totals that decided the award look far closer than the bidding was (chart below). Pond Constructors won at $48,781,556, VGS Infrastructure Services (Versar) came second at $50,388,070, and Weston Solutions third at $51,861,533.

On total evaluated price the field spans 6%. On the money the offerors actually priced, those same three bids span 70%.

Pond priced $4,418,141 of work. Weston priced $7,498,118 of it.