Decision Released: FBI Digital and IT Services Protest Denial

File No. B-421560.9

Digest

Protest challenging agency’s decision to eliminate the protester’s quotation from the competition is denied where the record shows that the protester’s quotation had several deviations between pricing and staffing, and the agency reasonably concluded that the quotation failed to comply with the terms of the solicitation.

Discussion

IntelliBridge acknowledges the deviations in its quotation identified by the agency and explains that, in submitting its pricing in phase three, it erroneously used information from its phase one initial staffing solution, rather than its phase one revised staffing solution. Nonetheless, IntelliBridge characterizes this as “an inadvertent copy-and-paste error” that should not have led to its elimination from the competition. Comments at 1. The protester argues that its error was not a “discrepancy” –even though it acknowledges that the RFQ prohibited deviations between staffing and pricing–and further argues that the agency should have excused its error because the information it priced with its initial staffing posed “no obstacle to the agency’s completion of the price evaluation.” Protest at 6.

In response, the agency maintains that its decision to eliminate IntelliBridge from the competition was reasonable and consistent with the terms of the solicitation. The record shows that the agency’s price evaluation team performed a compliance validation check of IntelliBridge’s pricing, found several deviations in the firm’s LCATs, and concluded that for its phase three price quotation, IntelliBridge erroneously used pricing from its initial staffing solution rather than its revised staffing solution …

Decision

IntelliBridge, LLC of McLean, Virginia, protests its elimination from the competition under request for quotations (RFQ) No. RFQ-09232022, issued by the Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for digital and information technology services. The protester argues that the agency’s decision to eliminate its quotation was unreasonable and, alternatively, the agency should have provided an opportunity for IntelliBridge to fix its quotation.

We deny the protest.

Read the decision here.

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