Civil Agencies Can Improve the Performance of Technical Evaluations

A review was made of the technical evaluations of 18 noncompetitive contract proposals. The objective of the review was to determine if technical evaluations were adequately performed and reported to the contracting officers for use in negotiating the noncompetitive contract prices.

GAO found that, contrary to Federal Procurement Regulations (FPR), technical evaluations were not performed for 7 proposals and were not adequately performed for 10 proposals. Of the 10 inadequate evaluations, 5 did not address critical components, such as labor hours, type of labor, and quantity of material, and 5 relied on insufficient data. Generally, the technical evaluators tended to concentrate solely on whether contractors could meet the contract requirements and did not assess whether the number of hours, type of labor, or quantity of materials proposed were reasonable and properly supported. Agencies' officials gave various reasons for not performing technical evaluations, such as inadequate cost or pricing data and confusion on technical evaluations performance responsibility. GAO did not consider the reasons valid since FPR require the contracting officer to obtain and evaluate cost and pricing data used to support noncompetitive price proposals. Notwithstanding the reasons, the contracts, the value of which totals about $12.4 million, were negotiated without the benefit of technical evaluations needed to assure that the proposed prices were fair and reasonable.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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