JTRS Protest Shot Down

The Government Accountability Office has shot down a protest by ITT Corp. claiming that Boeing was unfairly awarded a contract for Joint Tactical Radio System software.

According to the GAO's summary of the protest, released today, ITT claimed that Boeing had unfair access to technical information that could help it in a bid over enterprise network manager support because ITT was forced to share details about its waveform generation software during negotiations over a related contract. ITT also claimed that the Navy had given certain aspects of its bid unfairly low scores.

The GAO decided that the protest didn't hold water because ITT had access to the same information it wanted withheld from Boeing.

“ITT is complaining, not that Boeing had unequal access to information, but that ITT lost an informational advantage to which it believes it was entitled,” the GAO concluded. “An unequal access to information [organizational conflict of interest] can only be established where a protester shows that the awardee had information that it did not possess.”

The GAO also decided that even if the Navy had made a few mistakes in evaluating ITT's bid, they weren't important enough to change the outcome of the competition, and at the most, the two companies would have been neck-and-neck on technical grounds, in which case Boeing would have won on cost.