Solutions71, LLC (B-423671.2)

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Categories: Organizational conflict of interest, impaired objectivity, unequal access

Date: 30 December 2025

URL: https://www.gao.gov/products/b-423671.2

Solutions71 challenged the Air Force’s award of a GEOMAP sustainment task order to DDC IT, arguing the awardee had multiple organizational conflicts of interest through former government personnel and an affiliated company supporting related GEOMAP functions.

GAO denied the unfair-competitive-advantage and unequal-access theories. The record did not show that a former agency employee’s prior exposure to Solutions71 information would have been competitively useful for this different sustainment requirement, and GAO also found no meaningful proof that non-public acquisition information had been shared with the awardee.

But GAO sustained the protest on impaired objectivity. The agency failed to meaningfully consider whether the awardee’s affiliate, performing related work, would be in a position to review or recommend work touching the awardee’s own performance under the protested task order. That incomplete OCI analysis was enough to require corrective action.

Digest

1. Protest challenging agency's investigation of awardee's alleged unfair competitive advantage is denied where there is no evidence that information gained by former federal employee during the course of federal employment would be competitively useful to awardee in preparing proposal for the current requirement.
2. Protest challenging agency's investigation of awardee's alleged unequal access to information is denied where the record shows that access to non-public competitively useful acquisition information was not shared with awardee of the current requirement.
3. Protest challenging agency's investigation of impaired objectivity organizational conflict of interest is sustained where agency did not meaningfully consider conflict created by award of task order to awardee when awardee's corporate affiliate holds a related contract that will require affiliate to provide recommendations and review awardee's work under the protested task order.