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An Ohio information technology company urged the U.S. Court of Federal Claims to have the U.S. Army reinstate its eligibility for a pending $10 billion U.S. Army procurement, saying it shouldn't have been booted for an empty pricing spreadsheet cell.

Government Acquisition Inc., or GAI, argued that there were numerous reasons the Army's decision to exclude it from an IT hardware procurement was arbitrary, capricious and otherwise not in accordance with law, including that GAI's proposal contained full pricing information.

"The Government knew what GAI's proposal was," the company said in a redacted version of a motion for judgment on the administrative record it filed Friday. "GAI offered a fully compliant Total Contract Line Price (calculated according to the Government algorithm embedded in the spreadsheet) and there reasonably could have been no confusion about what GAI was offering."

It said the Army also had the discretion to waive the nonprice blank cell — which it said was one out of 1,352 cells — as a minor informality or irregularity but did not do so, despite doing so for other bidders after digging deeper into those proposals "as opposed to the mechanical and rote process applied to GAI's proposal."

GAI argued that the solicitation was also "latently ambiguous" and self-contradictory. It said that while the solicitation stated that the government would not assume a blank cell to represent a zero, the Army mandated the use of a price model spreadsheet that nevertheless made that assumption.

"At a minimum, this discrepancy is ambiguous, but moreover, it is flatly contradictory," GAI said. "And the effect of the contradiction is not insignificant."

GAI is one of several consolidated plaintiffs in a lawsuit another bidder, Govwave LLC, initiated in February, accusing the Army of wrongfully eliminating it from the Information Technology Enterprise Solutions 4 Hardware, or ITES-4H, procurement based on the agency being unsure of whether the company had any adverse past performance.

The solicitation, according to a redacted version of Govwave's complaint filed in late February, contemplates the award of at least 17 indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contracts to eligible contractors, including small businesses.

Other companies have joined in the suit including Futron Inc., DH Technologies Inc., Unicom Government Inc., and Enterprise Technology Solutions Inc., in addition to Advanced Computer Concepts Inc., which also moved for judgment on the administrative record, arguing that it was wrongly excluded for missing one word in its proposal.

GAI filed its motion for judgment under seal in April.

In its motion, GAI explained that the effect of leaving the cell blank was that it was assigned a value of zero for the purpose of calculating its total contract line price. It explained that when a column is summed in an Excel spreadsheet, it only sums the numbers following the blank space. It said that the Army's mandatory price model spreadsheet, however, did not do this. The government had an algorithm embedded in the spreadsheet that assigned a zero value to the blank cells, according to GAI.

GAI said that the Army found it to be noncompliant because it left blank a "fixed discount for warranty variations" cell, which called for a percentage, not a price.

The company said that there were no other deficiencies in its proposal and that its "price was complete."

In asking the court for injunctive relief directing the Army to rescind its notice of noncompliance and reinstate GAI to the competition, among other things, GAI argued that if the agency had any doubt about its discount percentage, it should have looked to its proposal for clarification. At no point did the Army do so, it said.

It explained that while the cell may not have had an input value, the Army treated that lack of input as a zero for purposes in formulating the spreadsheet and calculated relevant values.

It said the Army should've done a "simple inquiry" to confirm that the relevant discount percentage was, in fact, zero.

GAI also argued that the other offerors with blank cells remain in the competition. Others were retained despite not acknowledging amendments, or submitting more than one proposal, which it said was not allowed by the solicitation's strict compliance requirements.

"The Army applied unstated criteria to Step 1 review to keep certain offerors in the competition and treated offerors disparately," GAI said.

Counsel for GAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment late Monday, nor did the Army.

GAI is represented by Kathy C. Potter, John M. Murdock and Sharon A. Roach of Potter & Murdock PC.

The government is represented by Miles Jarrad Wright of the U.S. Department of Justice's Civil Division.

The lead case is GovWave LLC et al. v. U.S., case number 1:24-cv-00172, in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims.