GAO: Agencies Can’t Blindly Rely on Adjectival Ratings to Make Award Decisions

In evaluating proposals, an agency will sometimes use “adjectival ratings” (e.g., Excellent, Good, Acceptable) to describe its assessment of a proposal or portions of a proposal. But, importantly, an agency cannot evade its responsibility to reasonably evaluate proposals–based on the articulated evaluation criteria–by deferring solely to the assigned adjectival ratings. In other words, if the agency doesn’t perform a true qualitative assessment, but instead relies on mere labels to make its ultimate award decision, GAO will likely slap the agency’s hand. This issue recently arose in the Cyberdata Technologies, Inc., B-417084 (Feb. 6, 2019). There, the RFQ contemplated awarding a task order (to holders of a certain GWAC) for information technology support services for NOAA’s weather and climate computing infrastructure services program. The agency intended to award the task order to the vendor whose proposal represented the…

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