GAO Releases More Details on Contested Y-12/Pantex Contract
Nuclear Street News Team
Mon, May 13 2013 6:25 AM
Questionable
procurement decisions at the National Nuclear Security Administration
have emerged with the release of a ruling on a contested contract
awarded for management of the Y-12 and Pantex sites.
Babcock &
Wilcox currently oversees the sites and was among the bidders that
challenged the award to a Bechtel-led consortium called Consolidated
Nuclear Security in January. The Government Accountability Office, which
hears appeals of federal contract decisions, announced its
recommendation to reopen the contract process earlier but only recently
released its detailed reasoning for doing so.
In its ruling, the
GAO stated, "We sustain the protests based on the agency’s failure to
reasonably evaluate the feasibility and size of the offerors’ proposed
cost savings, as required by the terms of the solicitation."
It noted
that the source selection authority – the official in charge of picking
the winning bidder – changed days before the award. Earlier, NNSA staff
evaluated the likelihood that cost savings proposed in each bid would
actually be realized. But, the GAO said, the new SSA "acknowledged that
he did not perform any independent cost savings analysis, and further
testified that he was unaware that various portions of the proposed cost
savings had been evaluated by the CSAC (the agency’s own 'financial
management specialists') as 'not reasonable,' 'partially reasonable,' or
'cannot determine.'"
The amounts of the questionable savings
associated with each bid were redacted from the ruling released to the
public. Nonetheless, the GAO said NNSA should have considered them and
sought additional information where appropriate.
In its conclusion, the
ruling read, "We also recommend that, based on that evaluation, the
agency make a
new source selection decision taking into consideration
the relative size of the offerors’ feasible cost savings."
http://nuclearstreet.com/nuclear_power_industry_news/b/nuclear_power_news/archive/2013/05/13/gao-releases-more-details-on-contested-y_2d00_12_2f00_pantex-contract-051302.aspx
2 comments:
That was an interesting December. Neile Miller and her cohort, Mike Lempke, managed to grant unearned award terms to Bechtel for LLNL and LANS, then they rescored the Y-12/Pantex proposal to hand that one to the Bechtel team. By my calculation, that's $1.1 billion in fee to a non-performing company.
This is cool!
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