This free seminar will be of interest for Government contractors and prospective contractors.
Source: PNWC’s Government Contracting Update: Free DCAA Seminar – Registration Required
A “bid guarantee” (sometimes referred to as a “bid bond”) is a form of security assuring that the bidder will not withdraw a bid within the period specified for acceptance and will execute a written contract and furnish required bonds, including any necessary coinsurance or reinsurance agreements, within the time specified in the bid, unless a longer time allowed, after receipt of the specified forms (See FAR 28.001).
Source: PNWC’s Government Contracting Update: What are Bid Guarantees?
Ready to jump into the $450 billion government contracting space? Don’t make these key mistakes.
It’s no secret that the U.S. government is one of the largest buyers and sellers of goods and services in the world, leading to tremendous opportunity for companies that earn federal contracts. If you are a small business or startup you are in luck as the government sets aside contract requirements in favor of small and socio-economic enterprises. For example, in 2017 the government awarded 24 percent of federal contract dollars to small businesses totaling $105.7 billion.
With the right amount of planning, preparation and effective networking, small businesses can thrive in the federal contracting space, but there are some major mistakes or red flags to avoid.
Source: 5 critical mistakes small business contractors should avoid – FederalNewsRadio.com
In a strongly-worded opinion, a federal judge decried a “labyrinth of legal and regulatory hoops and hurdles” imposed on the VA as a result of the famous Kingdomware Supreme Court decision–and suggested that Congress could exercise a “kill switch” to curtail or even eliminate the SDVOSB and VOSB contracting preferences the Supreme Court unanimously affirmed.
Source: Federal Judge Suggests Congressional “Kill Switch” For Kingdomware SDVOSB Preferences – SmallGovCon
While changes in RFP instructions and solicitations may allow for improvements in the evaluation process, we must also consider ways in which to improve price evaluations. From federal agency to agency, there is not one consistent approach or practice to evaluating the tradeoff between a technical score and price. In our experience, Department of Defense agencies will sometimes pay 1-3% more for a higher technically rated proposal. For Civilian agencies, we have seen an average premium of 5-10% for higher technically rated proposals. But this is not a hard and fast rule. We have seen government agencies pay 30% more for proposals with higher technical ratings and we have also seen proposals priced 10% below the winning cost get removed for being unrealistically low. In Part 2 of this article series, I offer a recommendation to address one of the biggest challenges that takes place in government source selections: the evaluation and subjective tradeoff decisions on price. To reduce the amount of subjectivity in tradeoff decisions, we need to look at options that qualitatively score the price factor. Yes, that’s right, I recommend assigning an adjectival rating to price!
Source: Can We Figure Out a Way to Make Price Evaluations Easier?
Back on August 24th, we reported a proposed rule by the Defense Department that would significantly slash the progress payment rate from 80 to 50 percent unless contractors were able to achieve certain milestones such as contract delivery, no significant corrective action requests, no significant business system deficiencies, meeting subcontracting goals, among others (see Proposed Changes to Progress Payment Rate).
Source: PNWC’s Government Contracting Update: Proposed Changes to Progress Payment Rate – Withdrawn
There are two main ways that a whistleblower can sound the alarm. Their outcomes can be very different.
Source: How Contractor Fraud Is Reported Shouldn’t Affect How It Gets Investigated
A modern perspective on proposal development and what really matters
Source: 10 Steps to creating high-scoring proposals | Lohfeld
New, consolidated SDVOSB eligibility regulations kicked in on October 1. The new regulations replace the old VA and SBA rules, which provided separate eligibility standards for SDVOSBs.
This week on Off the Shelf, Tom Sisti, vice president and chief legislative counsel at SAP, provides his insights on the latest in procurement policy developments.
Source: Trends in government procurement – FederalNewsRadio.com