Like football fans, contractors considering bids on Department of Energy business often lack faith they will receive a fair shake from officials, a Tuesday report from a federal watchdog indicates.
Representatives from 15 of the 24 industry contractors interviewed by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) on DOE procurement “expressed concerns about the fairness of DOE’s evaluation factors or scoring of certain factors,” GAO said in the new report.
As a result, the DOE Office of Environmental Management plans to adopt some “reverse industry day” events. Such sessions “provide information to an agency’s acquisition workforce through the eyes and perceptions of industry,” according to the GAO report.
“The events can provide an agency’s acquisition professionals with an opportunity to learn more about industry’s processes related to pursuing, bidding on and winning federal contracts; debriefs; and protests—from industry’s viewpoint,” according to the GAO.
None of the DOE branches such as Environmental Management, the Office of Science and the National Nuclear Security Administration surveyed by GAO had an established system for seeking information from industry “outside of individual competitions,” GAO said.
In response to a GAO recommendation, Environmental Management agreed it would implement a more “structured mechanism” during fiscal 2023 to better understand how contractors decide whether to bid. The cleanup office said it already holds one-on-one meetings as well as other outreach efforts.
Although GAO said DOE procurements are fair, the perception of an uneven playing field might lead some contractors to stay on the sidelines. Some such contractors either cite bad past experience, or question whether the agency business will be sufficiently profitable to justify the time and expense of preparing a bid package, according to the report.
“Representatives from 13 of the 24 industry entities we interviewed expressed concerns about the risks associated with working for DOE compared with the rewards,” according to GAO. “These included concerns about profit margins, upfront costs, and corporate risk.”
The GAO report looked at 15 DOE procurements each with a potential total contract value of $750 million or more that were held between fiscal 2015 and 2020. Six were Office of Environmental Management awards. Two of these (Central Plateau Cleanup and landlord services) involved the Hanford Site in Washington state as well as cleanup contractors at the Idaho National Laboratory, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Paducah Site in Kentucky. There was also one nationwide decontamination and decommissioning work award.
According to GAO, the median number of offers per competition for the cleanup office during the studied procurements was three. The median number of offers for the National Nuclear Security Administration was four for the period. Three is considered sufficiently competitive by DOE.
