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Federal Market Intelligence for Small Business |
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Polaris on pauseGSA puts hold on bids after industry pushbackThe General Services Administration has put a hold on its governmentwide Polaris IT services and solutions contract while it reconsiders its requirements for joint venture past performance. The GSA released its Polaris solicitation package for small business and women-owned small business offers on March 18. A protest subsequently was filed by BD Squared, and several industry members raised concerns. GSA on April 7 announced it is pausing the solicitation. “After receiving feedback related to the evaluation of joint ventures under Polaris, GSA is currently assessing whether any changes are necessary for the RFPs,” GSA said in an announcement on GSA Interact. The due dates will be extended and companies should pause working on their bids until the reassessment of joint venture is completed, GSA added. The original due date was May 13. However, the due date to submit questions to GSA at polaris@gsa.gov is still April 18. Joint Venture evaluation concerns The main concern expressed by industry members is that GSA removed previous limits on the number of relevant experience examples that can be submitted by a mentor in a joint venture mentor-protege arrangement. There also are changes to validation requirements. Some interpreted the language in the Polaris Q&A to mean that a mentor-protégé joint venture likely would rely completely on the experience of the large business mentor. “The optics are terrible here,” Stephanie Mitchell, co-owner of BD Squared, told FedNewsNetwork. “This will be a small business vehicle controlled by large businesses... Based on the new information from GSA, they are not evaluating small businesses at all in Polaris, since the information in the bids will mainly come from large businesses.” Isiah “Cy” Alba, partner with PilieroMazza PLLC, saw positives and negatives in GSA’s changes to joint venture evaluations. “In cases where the small business protégé may not have a large amount of experience, and therefore be unable to meet the relevant experience requirements and point totals to secure an award to win a spot on Polaris, the removal of this restriction allows small business protégés to competitively bid in all task areas as long as their mentor has relevant experience,” Alba wrote in the alert. “ At the same time, this change could harm small businesses planning to work with multiple other small businesses, especially those with less experience than large mentors or those whose experience is on much smaller contracts than the large mentors. It will certainly make it more difficult for individual small businesses to win a seat on the Polaris contract,” Alba wrote in the client alert. Alba also noted a positive change for small business in the GSA also broadened the definition of “business arrangement” to include mentor-protege joint ventures and their proposed subcontractors. “This should enable many more teams to achieve higher scores because they can now use past efforts, even if they were small endeavors,” Alba wrote.
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