Government Contracts: GAO Issues Rare Decision Sustaining Corrective Action Challenge

In Short

The Situation: Challenges to the scope of an agency's corrective action are notoriously hard to win at the U.S. Government Accountability Office ("GAO") because of the high level of deference normally afforded to agencies in crafting corrective action. However, in a recent decision, GAO sustained a bid protest challenging an agency's corrective action, finding that the scope was "unreasonably limited."

The Result: GAO found that the scope of the corrective action was too narrow. The agency allowed proposal revisions to only a limited portion of offerors' proposals, but the solicitation required that proposal sections be consistent with each other. Because changes to one section of the proposal would materially impact other aspects of the proposals that offerors were not permitted to change, GAO found the limitation to be unreasonable.