Perimeter Security Partners, LLC (B-422666.4)
You should care.
Category: Latent ambiguity, page limits
Date: 11 March 2025
Perimeter Security Partners, LLC (PSP), of Brentwood, Tennessee, protested the US Army Corps of Engineers’ award of a task order to Low Voltage Wiring LTD (LVW), for preventive and corrective maintenance services at access control points across 19 Army installations in the northeastern United States under RFQ No. W912DY-24-R-0008. PSP argued the Corps unreasonably evaluated its technical proposal as unacceptable based on an alleged violation of the solicitation’s page limit due to ambiguity in interpreting “Drawings etc.” PSP contended that the organizational and response-time charts excluded by the agency were not intended to count towards the page limit.
GAO found a latent ambiguity in the solicitation regarding the exclusion of charts from the technical narrative page count, determining both the Corps’ and PSP’s interpretations of "Drawings etc." to be reasonable. The Corps’ initial evaluation considered PSP’s charts within the page limits, whereas the subsequent evaluation did not. GAO concluded the ambiguity prejudiced PSP competitively, and thus sustained the protest, recommending clarification of the solicitation requirements and reevaluation of quotations or a reevaluation of PSP’s quotation consistent with PSP's interpretation.
Digest
Protest challenging agency’s determination that protester’s quotation exceeded solicitation’s page limits is sustained where the solicitation was latently ambiguous regarding what information the agency would exclude when determining whether a quotation exceeded the page limits.
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