By Oles Morrison on November 4, 2015 | Posted in Bid Protests
A recent decision by GAO in FedServ-RBS JV, LLC, B-411790, provides yet another reminder to 8(a) joint ventures to submit proposed joint venture agreements to the U.S. Small Business Administration (“SBA”) for approval as early as possible. This case shows that waiting until the last minute to submit your joint venture agreement to SBA […]
By Oles Morrison on October 15, 2015 | Posted in Bid Protests
A recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) bid protest decision provides yet another example of the importance for contractors to identify potential organizational conflicts of interest (OCI) when submitting a proposal in response to a federal government solicitation. In DV United, LLC, B-411620, B-411620.2, Sept. 16, 2015, GAO denied a bid protest […]
By Oles Morrison on October 6, 2015 | Posted in Bid Protests
Have you ever had a contract dispute and looked back at the contract only to realize that you hadn’t contemplated that type of dispute occurring, and the contract is essentially silent on the issue? It seems that this is the type of situation that GAO recently encountered with its bid protest regulations. Unfortunately, this […]
By Oles Morrison on October 1, 2015 | Posted in Bid Protests
In a recent bid protest decision, Coulson Aviation (USA), Inc., the Government Accountability Office (“GAO”) injected uncertainty regarding informal communications between a prospective offeror and the agency expressing concern about a solicitation provision. Unfortunately, this decision may punish contractors that seek to resolve concerns about a solicitation outside the protest […]
By Oles Morrison on June 2, 2015 | Posted in Suspension and Debarment
Last week we discussed the FY2014 Interagency Suspension and Debarment Committee Report released in April, and discussed how the data in that report is compiled. This week we are breaking down the numbers in the report. FY 2014 saw an increase in overall numbers of suspensions, proposed debarments, and debarments. There […]
By Oles Morrison on May 28, 2015 | Posted in Suspension and Debarment
It’s the time of year again to obsess over numbers that are mostly irrelevant. On April 1, the Interagency Suspension and Debarment Committee released its FY2014 report releasing the number of exclusion actions government-wide that agencies initiated. These numbers include suspensions, proposed debarments, and debarments as well as administrative agreements. […]
By Oles Morrison on April 21, 2015 | Posted in Suspension and Debarment
In the previous post, the World Bank’s system for debarment was discussed. This post discusses the collateral impacts of a World Bank debarment in the context of the World Bank’s debarment of Alstom SA. What did the World Bank debarment of Alstom mean in the broader context of international procurement? […]
By Oles Morrison on April 1, 2015 | Posted in Suspension and Debarment
On February 25, 2015, the World Bank lifted its debarment of Alstom SA. The company had been debarred after it was discovered it had made improper payments for consultant services to an entity controlled by a former senior government official on a World Bank-finance project in Zambia in 2002. The terms of the debarment required […]
By Oles Morrison on January 15, 2015 | Posted in Suspension and Debarment
This month I wanted share an article I recently found on the OECD Foreign Bribery Report, written by Richard Bistrong. Mr. Bistrong is a former international sales executive who himself was convicted of bribery and debarred, and Mr. Bistrong spent 14 ½ months in prison. Prior to his conviction, Mr. […]
By Oles Morrison on January 9, 2015 | Posted in Legislative and Regulatory Developments
Back in September 2014, NASA awarded contracts to Boeing and SpaceX to provide Commercial Crew Transportation Capability (aka space shuttle services) to transport astronauts to/from the International Space Station by 2017. Subsequently, Sierra Nevada, who submitted a proposal but was not awarded a contract, filed a protest at GAO challenging the […]
By Oles Morrison on January 7, 2015 | Posted in Procurement Issues
The National Industrial Recovery Act, part of the New Deal policies in 1934, allowed businesses employing individuals with disabilities to pay less than minimum wage to their disabled workers. This “sub-minimum” wage policy was buttressed by the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act which allows employers to apply for Section 14(c) […]
By Oles Morrison on December 17, 2014 | Posted in Labor
On December 9, 2014, the U.S Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (“OFCCP”) published a final rule implementing Executive Order (EO) 13672 effectively amending EO 11246, which previously only prohibited discrimination by federal contractors and subcontractors on the bases of race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. […]
By Oles Morrison on December 4, 2014 | Posted in Suspension and Debarment
In the not so very distant past, companies mainly needed to worry about exclusion from public contracting in the United States. However, the exclusion trend has caught on internationally. Recently, Canada has revised their exclusion policies to require companies to certify that neither the company nor its affiliates have committed a […]
By Oles Morrison on November 24, 2014 | Posted in
In most litigation, the plaintiff and the defendant are equally susceptible to being sanctioned by the court for bad or dilatory behavior. However, government contracts litigation is not most litigation. In government contracts litigation (claims or protests), the contractor is more susceptible to being sanctioned than the government. But the government is […]
By Oles Morrison on November 21, 2014 | Posted in
Could a new generation of aircraft carriers change how future conflicts are fought from the sky? The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) aims to find out. This month, DARPA, the agency charged with developing new military technologies for the Department of Defense, issued a Request for Information (RFI) for “Distributed Airborne Capabilities,” or in other words […]