For a Best Value Tradeoff (BVT) procurement the Government has three non-price factor weighting choices (per FAR 15-101):
- significantly more important than cost/price
- approximately equal to cost/price
- or significantly less important than cost/price
Usually we see the first one, where non-price factors are more important than price. But what do the numbers say based on Government Accountability Office (GAO) protest decisions? How prevalent are the other two?
To answer this question we did a word search through over 6,500 GAO Protest PDF documents dating back to 2001. The results confirm, within our target data, the assertion that putting non-price factors well above price is preferred. But read closely those solicitation documents because they may include one of the other two weighting statements.
- Total GAO PDFs searched: 6,455
- Text occurrences that contained one of the above target phrases (1,682):
- significantly more important than cost/price: 1,556 (92.5%)
- approximately equal to cost/price: 116 (6.9%)
- or significantly less important than cost/price: 10 (<1%)
Have an analysis question on GAO Protest decisions? Email it to us and we will consider it for an upcoming blog post.