GAO issued its annual report on Christmas Eve eve and it included a pretty big surprise. For the first time in who knows how long (five years at least) bid protests were more likely to succeed than not.
According to the report, 51 percent of the GAO bid protests resolved in 2020 resulted in either a sustain or corrective action (reported as the “Effectiveness Rate”).
The vast majority of those successful protests were resolved by the agency taking voluntary corrective action. The actual sustain rate was only 15 percent, which is consistent with previous years. (It was 13 percent in 2019 and 15 percent in 2018.)
Some people look at that sustain rate and figure that there’s no point in filing a protest because GAO only sustains one out of every six filed. But that’s nowhere near the whole picture. According to the report, 2,149 protests were filed (down 2 percent from the year before) and GAO issued 545 decisions on the merits. It sustained only 84 of those. Believe it or not, that means that GAO only granted 4 percent of the total bid protests filed this year. But protests were still 51 percent successful.
I’m no math major, but that must mean an awful lot of protests resulted in corrective action. Now, having an effectiveness rate of more than 50 percent is notable for the mere fact that it means for the first time in a long time bid protests were more likely to succeed than not, but it is not actually a huge increase over the last few years. From 2016 to 2019, the effectiveness rates were 46 percent, 47 percent, 44 percent, and 44 percent. So, historically speaking, protests stand a darn good chance of success—now more than ever.
Finally, GAO also revealed the four most successful protest arguments. They were: 1) unreasonable technical evaluation, 2) flawed solicitation, 3) unreasonable cost or price evaluation, and 4) unreasonable past performance evaluation.
In short, while a GAO sustain is rare, the chance of success is far from it. In fact, this year at least, the odds were in the protester’s favor.
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GAO: Protest Success Rate Tops 50 Percent was last modified: December 24th, 2020 by