The award to Salient will be rescinded, and the agency will begin a fresh acquisition using a different contract vehicle, as the task order being protested is an award under EAGLE II, which expires in September of 2020 and thus is not available to provide five years of uninterrupted service.Ībacus filed a response to the agency’s notice in which Abacus objected to the scope of the corrective action. The agency’s notice provided, in pertinent part, as follows: Relevant here, the agency also proposed to cancel the solicitation and resolicit its requirement using a different contract vehicle. As a result, USCIS proposed to rescind the award to Salient. Specifically, the agency represented that it had identified errors in its most probable cost adjustment, which may have impacted the cost/technical tradeoff determination. Agency Report (AR), Exh. 21, Agency Notice of Corrective Action. On January 22, USCIS notified our Office of its intent to take corrective action. On January 14, in response to the agency report, Abacus filed a supplemental protest, challenging additional aspects of the agency’s most probable cost adjustment. The agency submitted is agency report in this protest on January 3, 2019. On December 4, Abacus filed a protest challenging multiple aspects of the agency’s evaluation, including the agency’s most probable cost adjustment, which the agency prepared as part of its cost realism analysis. On November 26, at the conclusion of its reevaluation, USCIS issued the task order to Salient. Salient CRGT, Inc., B‑416390, June 19, 2018 (unpublished decision).ĭuring the implementation of the agency’s corrective action, USCIS decided to establish a competitive range comprised of four offerors that submitted the most highly rated proposals, including Abacus and Salient, and to conduct discussions with those four offerors. On June 19, we dismissed Salient’s protest as academic. Agency Notice of Corrective Action, JCOS at 1-2. Specifically, the agency explained that it had discovered a number of errors in its cost realism analysis and that, as a result, it intended to revise its evaluation report and make a new award decision. Subsequent to the filing of the protest by Salient, USCIS notified our Office of its intent to take corrective action, which rendered the protest academic. Salient filed a protest with our Office on May 18 challenging, among other things, the agency’s cost realism analysis. On May 14, 2018, USCIS issued the task order to Abacus. In response to the solicitation, USCIS received proposals from 12 offerors, including, as relevant here, proposals from Abacus and Salient CRGT, Inc. (Salient), an offeror located in Fairfax, Virginia. The solicitation anticipated award on a best-value tradeoff basis considering the following factors: management approach, technical approach, past performance, and cost/price. The solicitation contemplated the award of a hybrid fixed-price-award-fee, cost-plus-award-fee, and cost-reimbursement task order with a period of performance of a base year followed by up to three option years or until “the end of the period of performance of the underlying EAGLE II FC I Master Contract.” Id. The performance work statement required the contractor to provide service desk support, field services, service center services, account management services, hardware incident resolution, and continuity of operations coordination. The solicitation contemplated the award of a single task order, referred to as the National Area and Transnational Information Technology Operations and Next-Generation Support Services (NATIONS) II task order, to fulfill a requirement of USCIS’s Office of Information Technology to provide a broad range of information technology support services to agency end users. See also Contracting Officers’ Statement (COS) at 1. On June 27, 2017, USCIS issued the solicitation pursuant to the provisions of Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) subpart 16.5 to firms holding DHS Enterprise Acquisition Gateway for Leading-Edge Solutions (EAGLE) II indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity (IDIQ) contracts in Functional Category (FC) I. The protester contends that the agency lacked a reasonable basis to cancel the solicitation and that the cancellation was a pretext to avoid defending against a possible future protest. Abacus Technology Corporation (Abacus), of Chevy Chase, Maryland, protests the cancellation of request for proposals (RFP) No. HSSCCG-17-R-00010, issued by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), for information technology services.
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