Small business contract to get new requirements, more awards – By Jessie Bur (Federal Times) / Aug 22 2019
The General Services Administration is making a second attempt at its governmentwide small business IT contract, after the first award of the contract was ruled invalid by a federal court.
The 10-year, $15 billion Alliant 2 Small Business contract was first awarded to 81 businesses in February 2018, but a complaint brought to court by Citizant Inc., which claimed that the contracting officer had made arbitrary and irrational decisions in determining awardees, caused a permanent injunction to be placed on the contract.
A draft amendment to the contract, published to FedBizOpps Aug. 19, would change the number of planned awardees for the contract from a maximum of 80 to a maximum of 120, with allowances made for contractors that tie for the last available slot.
The changes would also remove the seventh volume of requirements for a contract submission, which stipulated that “for populated joint ventures, financial responsibility documents required by Volume 7 must be submitted for the joint venture itself. For unpopulated joint ventures, financial responsibility documents required by Volume 7 must be submitted for each member of the joint venture.”
Instead, the proposed amendment would inform contractors that the government may contact them after the submission of their proposal to obtain documents as part of the government’s responsibility determination.
The contract was originally posted to FedBizOpps in June 2016, making it over three years without a concrete award.
The Alliant 2 and Alliant 2 Small Business contracts were designed to replace the first iterations of such vehicles with the same name, and the regular Alliant 2 contract was awarded in November 2017, well ahead of the original Alliant contract’s April 2019 expiration.
According to the GSA website, the Alliant Small Business contract ordering period ended on Feb. 2, 2019.
