Castro & Company, LLC (B-423689)

You should care.

Categories: OCI, impaired objectivity, technical evaluation

Date: 13 November 2025

URL: https://www.gao.gov/products/b-423689

Castro & Company protests the establishment of a BPA with Contracts Management Enterprises for financial management and accounting support services for the Federal Election Commission. The RFQ was issued as a small business set-aside on a best value tradeoff basis with the technical approach factor significantly more important than price. Castro submitted the lowest priced quotation at $1.79 million to CME's $1.83 million, but received a rating of marginal under technical approach compared to CME's outstanding. GAO sustained the protest on three independent grounds.

Impaired objectivity OCI: CME holds a separate task order providing a contract specialist to the FEC's procurement office, working directly with the contracting officer who served as the source selection authority for this procurement. The contracting officer acknowledged a potential OCI and claimed to have established a firewall, but the agency produced no contemporaneous documentation of any OCI investigation, analysis, or mitigation plan. The mitigation steps described—isolating procurement information from CME personnel—addressed unequal access to information, not impaired objectivity. GAO found the agency failed to meaningfully investigate, consider, or document the impaired objectivity OCI.

Technical evaluation: The agency assessed Castro a weakness for lacking "timeline details" not required by the solicitation and a deficiency for lacking a "structured response" despite Castro's proposal being organized in direct alignment with the SOW headings. The agency offered no post-protest explanation identifying specific missing requirements or vague assertions.

Best value tradeoff: The contracting officer's tradeoff excluded Castro's technically acceptable, lowest-priced quotation without explanation. The solicitation did not define marginal as rendering a quotation ineligible.

The protest is sustained. GAO recommended the agency investigate and document the OCI, reevaluate Castro's quotation, and make a new source selection decision. Castro was awarded protest costs.

Digest

1. Protest alleging that agency failed to consider unmitigable organizational conflict of interest (OCI) is sustained where the agency failed to document its consideration of an apparent OCI arising from the awardee's role providing a contract specialist in the agency's procurement office.
2. Protest challenging reasonableness of agency's technical evaluation is sustained where the evaluation of the protester's quotation under the technical approach factor was unsupported by the record and inadequately documented.
3. Protest challenging agency's best-value tradeoff decision is sustained where the agency's tradeoff analysis did not include any documented rationale for not considering the protester's lowest-priced quotation.