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B-416733.2 1 (2019-03-18)

handle is hein.gao/gaobadvsc0001 and id is 1 raw text is: G A O U.S. GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABILITY OFFICE 441 G St. N.W. Comptroller General Washington, DC 20548 of the United States DOCUMENT FOR PUBLIC RELEASE The decision issued on the date below was subject to a GAO Protective Order. This version has been Decision .approved for public release. Matter of: Department of Defense--Reconsideration File: B-416733.2 Date: March 18, 2019 Stephan Piel, Esq., Department of Defense, for the requester. Alex J. Brittin, Esq., Brittin Law Group, PLLC, for the protester. Evan D. Wesser, Esq., and Edward Goldstein, Esq., Office of the General Counsel, GAO, participated in the preparation of the decision. DIGEST Request for reconsideration of a prior decision sustaining a protest concerning an unduly restrictive solicitation provision is denied, where the requester does not show that the prior decision contains errors of fact or law that warrant reversal or modification of the decision. DECISION The Department of Defense (DOD), Washington Headquarters Services, requests reconsideration of our decision in Grant Thornton, LLC, B-416733, Nov. 29, 2018, 2018 CPD T 411, sustaining Grant Thornton's protest of the terms of request for quotations (RFQ) No. HQ003418R0198, which was issued by DOD, for auditing support services. The protester argued that the RFQ, which the agency issued pursuant to the Federal Supply Schedule (FSS) provisions of Federal Acquisition Regulation subpart 8.4, was unduly restrictive of competition because it required vendors to quote labor categories that align[ed] precisely with the minimum years of experience in the RFQ. We sustained the protest finding that the solicitation was unduly restrictive of competition because it required vendors' FSS contracts to align precisely with the solicitation's minimum number of years of experience for identified labor categories. Specifically, we agreed with Grant Thornton, and input provided by the General Services Administration (GSA) (which our Office invited to participate in the protest pursuant to 4 C.F.R. § 21.3(j)), that a vendor with a FSS labor category to provide personnel with a minimum of 10 years of experience, 10+ years of experience, or at least 10 years of experience, was within the scope of the RFQ's requirement for 12 years of experience. In this regard, we concluded that the terms of such a FSS labor