The Lioce Group, Inc. (B-423797)

You should not care.

Categories: Process issue

Date: 22 December 2025

URL: https://www.gao.gov/products/b-423797

The Lioce Group protested DLA’s award to Cartridge Technologies for a lease of multifunction devices and related services supporting Headquarters Army Materiel Command. The fight was over reverse-auction mechanics, not copier performance or substantive evaluation.

After DLA found four quotations technically acceptable, it invited those vendors to a reverse auction. The instructions said vendors’ quotation prices would be entered into the Procurex platform as initial bids, followed by a regulation bidding period and then a blind-bid period. Lioce argued it was the only bidder that actively submitted a bid during the regulation period and that Cartridge Technologies therefore should have been barred from submitting a blind bid.

GAO denied the protest. Reading the auction instructions as a whole, it found quotation prices entered into Procurex by the agency counted as valid initial bids during the regulation period, which made CTI eligible to participate in the final blind phase. Lioce’s narrower reading could not be squared with the instructions or with what it saw during the auction itself.

The protest is denied.

Digest Protest that award is improper because the agency failed to adhere to reverse auction instructions is denied where the agency's evaluation was reasonable and consistent with the reverse auction procedures.