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.”
