Quote:
Originally Posted by GGG
You can be sued for not awarding the contract to the lowest bidder if they meet the qualifications of the RFP. I know it's ridiculous but it exists to prevent people from awarding to who they want to instead of the lowest bidder meeting spec.
Key in the first memo is that All firms are qualified to do the work. Once you make that statement it becomes difficult to award to other than the lowest bidder.
To really know we'd need a copy of the rfp to see the evaluation criteria.
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Every government RFP I have seen, for many years now, has contained a clause stating that the contract will not necessarily be awarded to the lowest bidder. They also always have a clause stating that they may choose to reject all bids and reopen the tender process. They usually award to the lowest qualified bidder but not always. Generally on large contracts they pre-qualify the bidders to avoid problems like this, sounds like in this case there was a lot of political interference which is not surprising given what we have learned. If I had to guess it would be that the procurement folks were told to include that firm even though they didn't feel they were as qualified as the other bidders.