Winspear Construction, LLC (B-423869)

You should not care.

Categories: Subcontracting, process issue

Date: 30 December 2025

URL: https://www.gao.gov/products/b-423869

Winspear Construction protested the VA’s elimination of its proposal from a competition for a multiple-award task order contract covering construction, maintenance, alteration, and repair services at VA medical facilities in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. The dispute involved a proposal submission defect, not the merits of technical or price evaluation.

The solicitation required offerors to submit a specific January 2023 version of VAAR clause 852.219-75 certifying compliance with limitations on subcontracting, and warned that use of any other version would make a proposal ineligible for award. Winspear instead submitted the older November 2022 version and argued the agency should have treated it as sufficient or at least sought clarifications.

GAO denied the protest. It reiterated that the certification requirement is a material term of the solicitation and found the VA reasonably rejected Winspear’s proposal given the solicitation’s explicit instructions that the older clause version would not be accepted and that the defect could not be cured through clarifications or discussions.

The protest is denied.

Digest

Challenge to the agency's determination that the protester's proposal was ineligible for award, based on the omission of the correct version of the required certification regarding compliance with a contractual limitation on subcontracting, is denied where the solicitation required the submission of a specific version of the certification with the proposal and advised that a failure to submit that specific version of the certification would make the proposal ineligible for award.