I wrote an article that was recently published in the latest Procurement Lawyer and looks at a specific form of evaluation procedure that has become increasingly common in federal procurements—the self-scoring evaluation. Under the self-evaluation process, businesses are instructed to score their experience against criteria established by the agency. Through this process, businesses convert their experience to points. The process is much like grading your own spelling test in elementary school. During the evaluation, the federal agency will review the self-scoring, as well as documents that validate the claimed points. Unsurprisingly, highest validated score wins.
While self-scoring is a straightforward approach to proposal evaluation, there are limitations. Self-scoring was born from the need to efficiently review hundreds of proposals submitted for the OASIS government wide contract. The efficiency of self-scoring evaluations was warranted for OASIS, even if it effectively eliminated the opportunity for innovative technical solutions. Since OASIS anticipated individual orders under the contract would be further competed using more traditional strategies, the lack of innovative opportunities was less of a hinderance.
Since OASIS, the self-scoring evaluation has been utilized not just for large government wide contracts, but also for highly technical procurements with a few competitors. In his article, Ian makes the case that the self-scoring system is ill suited for use on small and technical competitions because it effectively prevents any consideration of exceptional technical merit. Instead, every offeror is reduced to a point total based on experience, not proposed solutions. Under these circumstances, it’s not always clear Uncle Sam is getting the most bang for his buck.
If you’d like to take a deeper dive into my review of the self-scoring evaluation, you can read the full article in the winter edition of the Procurement Lawyer. If you have any questions about government contracting, please call or email us at Schoonover & Moriarty LLC.