Tiber Creek Consulting, Inc.

The procurement

The Army competed a fixed-price task order (1-year base, four 1-year options) among ITES-3S IDIQ holders under FAR 16.505 fair opportunity procedures to design, operate and maintain the Army Training Requirements and Resources System (ATRRS). Halvik Corporation won with a higher technical rating at a price of $87,134,131, higher than Tiber's.

The protest

Halvik received a strength because its notional staffing plan gave it flexibility to shift resources between CLINs and adjust its skill mix over the life of the order. Tiber argued its own notional staffing plan was inherently flexible and offered the same benefits, yet it was not equally credited. Tiber called this unequal treatment of materially similar proposals.

The agency’s answer

The Army maintained that the evaluators treated both offerors fairly and that the different results reflected differences in what each firm proposed. It added that, to the extent Tiber sought recognition for proposing flexibility, Tiber had already received that recognition elsewhere in its evaluation.

What decided it

Tiber did not show the proposals were substantively indistinguishable; its own argument revealed differences, like fewer hours.

GAO denied the disparate treatment ground. A protester must show the agency rated aspects of its proposal differently from aspects of another proposal that were substantively indistinguishable or nearly identical, and Tiber did not. Rather than showing similarities, Tiber's challenge pointed out the proposals' substantive differences, including that Tiber proposed fewer hours for the Senior Technical Manager Web key position and fewer hours overall.