B-311327, Mark Whetstone-Designated Employee Agent, May 20, 2008

B-311327 May 20, 2008 Jump To VIEW DECISION DOWNLOADS RELATED PAGES GAO CONTACTS Highlights Mark Whetstone, Designated Employee Agent, protests the actions of the Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Nebraska Service Center, under contract No. HSSCCG-07-D-0006. The protester maintains that the agency is improperly converting a function currently performed by agency adjudicators to a privately performed function without conducting a public/private competition. We dismiss the protest. View Decision B-311327, Mark Whetstone-Designated Employee Agent, May 20, 2008 Decision Matter of: Mark Whetstone-Designated Employee Agent File: B-311327 Date: May 20, 2008 Mark Whetstone, Designated Employee Agent, for the protester. Barbara Walthers, Esq., Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, for the agency. Scott H. Riback, Esq., and John M. Melody, Esq., Office of General Counsel, GAO, participated in the preparation of the decision. DIGEST Protest that agency is improperly converting a publicly performed function to a privately performed function without first conducting a public/private competition is dismissed where agency is acquiring the services in question through the exercise of an optional line item under a preexisting contract; the statute requiring agencies to conduct public/private competitions and providing designated employee agents standing to protest such competitions is, by its terms, inapplicable to acquisitions publicly announced prior to enactment of the statute. DECISION Mark Whetstone, Designated Employee Agent, protests the actions of the Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, NebraskaServiceCenter, under contract No. HSSCCG-07-D-0006. The protester maintains that the agency is improperly converting a function currently performed by agency adjudicators to a privately performed function without conducting a public/private competition. We dismiss the protest. The agency has four service centers, located in California, Nebraska, Texas and Vermont, where it performs immigration benefit application services. At each of the four service centers, the agency has a number of government employees that act as adjudicators whose function is to make determinations regarding the eligibility of applicants to receive immigration benefits. These determinations are made based on information included in each prospective beneficiary's application form. In December, 2006, the agency issued a solicitation that contemplated the award of an indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract for a base year, with two 1-year options. The solicitation, as amended, called for the submission of proposals by February 28, 2007. On September 21, the agency awarded a contract to SI International, Inc. after conducting a full and open competition among private concerns. The contract is for application processing support services at the Texas and Nebraska service centers, and contemplates the performance of mail processing, data collection, fee processing and file operation support services. Among other things, the contractor's employees currently perform data entry services by entering information, including the applicant's name, from the application forms into the agency's –CLAIMS 3— data base. Agency employees then take the names that have recently been entered into the CLAIMS 3 data base and run them through the Interagency Border Inspection System (IBIS) to determine whether the names from the CLAIMS 3 data base match names in criminal data bases included in the IBIS. Contractor employees then print out the results of the IBIS check and include the printout in the application files, which then are forwarded to government employees, who resolve any matches between CLAIMS 3 data base names and information in the IBIS criminal data bases. The government adjudicators' responsibilities include entering data into the IBIS data base relating to any aliases that might be in the application file (IBIS alias checks). SI International's contract includes an optional line item to perform these IBIS alias checks, and this work is the subject of the instant protest. On February 25, 2008, an agency employee forwarded to the protester an e-mail that included a draft of a message soliciting volunteers among the adjudicators at the agency's Nebraska processing center to engage in a test program that would involve SI International personnel performing the IBIS alias checks. Letter of Protest, Mar. 5, 2008, exh. 1. Based on the contents of this e-mail, Mr. Whetstone filed the instant protest, asserting that having SI International perform the IBIS alias checks would amount to the improper conversion of a function from government to contractor performance without the conduct of a public/private competition.