B-310865, Nuclear Regulatory Commission--Availability of Appropriations for Credit Monitoring Services, April 14, 2008

B-310865 Apr 14, 2008 Jump To VIEW DECISION RELATED PAGES GAO CONTACTS Highlights If the Nuclear Regulatory Commission were to mistakenly disclose to the public personally identifiable information of an employee or private citizen, its appropriation is available to pay for credit monitoring services as long as the Commission determines that it is necessary under the particular circumstances. In making such a determination, the Commission should be guided by the risk-based, tailored approach outlined by the Office of Management and Budget. Such an expenditure would be consistent with statutory breach notification and mitigation requirements and, notwithstanding any collateral personal benefit to an employee or individual, would be a necessary expense of the agency. View Decision B-242511.3, Sep 26, 1991 DIGEST: 1. Under request for proposals which required offerors to provide detailed technical proposals describing their approach to meeting the agency's requirements and which stated that those proposals would be evaluated under various specified technical evaluation criteria, offerors were on notice that qualitative distinctions would be made among the proposals in the evaluation of offers. 2. Disparity in technical scoring among individual evaluators does not by itself cast doubt on the validity of evaluation panel's final conclusions with respect to technical merits of a proposal since it is not unusual for individual evaluators to reach disparate conclusions when judging proposals, as both objective and subjective judgments are involved. Attorneys Cybernated Automation Corporation: Cybernated Automation Corporation protests the award of a contract to Munck Automation Technology under request for proposals (RFP) No. DACA56- 90-R-0014, issued by the Army Corps of Engineers for an automatic storage and retrieval system which will be used for radioactive components. We deny the protest in part and dismiss it in part. BACKGROUND The RFP sought proposals to design, build, install, and debug a turn key automatic storage and retrieval system. The solicitation included detailed technical specifications and other requirements for the system and required offerors to describe by drawings, text or other means the equipment proposed. The solicitation designated some features of the system as "mandatory," and stated that these requirements "must be met." Other features were designated "desirable" or "high want" features and, according to the solicitation, an offeror's final ranking was to reflect the degree to which an offer fulfilled these requirements. Under the RFP, award was to be made to the offeror whose proposal was technically acceptable and most advantageous to the government, price and other factors considered. The solicitation stated that technical considerations would be more important than price and included the following technical evaluation factors: 1. Compliance with all mandatory items identified in the solicitation. 2. Acceptance testing performed on a fully operational system. 3. Manual backup for conveyor system. 4. Automatic lubrication system. 5. Descriptive materials and references from similar projects. 6. Vendors acceptance test forms. 7. System control for the conveyors and cranes. 8. Applications software. The solicitation listed these factors in descending order of importance with factors 2, 3 and 4 having equal weight and factors 5, 6 and 7 having equal weight. Three firms submitted proposals. After the initial technical evaluation, discussions and receipt of best and final offers (BAFO), the three members of the evaluation panel individually evaluated and scored each of the proposals. Then, the three evaluators met and agreed to a consensus evaluation and consensus total score for each of the three proposals. The consensus scores and proposed prices were as follows: Offeror Score Price Munck 3,300 $ 2,375,881 Eaton-Kenway, Inc. 3,100 $ 2,885,994 Cybernated 2,600 $ 2,170,671 The Army concluded that Munck's proposal was the most advantageous to the government and, therefore, awarded the contract to Munck despite the fact that its price was slightly higher than that offered by Cybernated. Cybernated received the lowest technical score as a result of numerous concerns about its technical proposal. The agency's final technical evaluation report listed five major areas of concern. The first area involved the statement in Cybernated's proposal that its pneumatic elevators would consume air in the facility at 180 cubic feet per minute (cfm), a rate considered by the evaluators to be excessive. Second, Cybernated proposed commercial grade computer equipment, which the evaluators believed could result in significant system downtime. Further, in this regard, the agency evaluators were concerned that Cybernated proposed software that could not be modified by the user. /1/ Third, the evaluators stated that in spite of the fact that solicitation amendment No.