A single misplaced conversation before award can end a career and unwind a contract. FAR Subpart 3.104 spells out the Procurement Integrity Act's core rule in blunt terms: no person may knowingly disclose contractor bid or proposal information or source selection information before a federal agency awards the contract, and no one may knowingly obtain that information before award either. The statute reaches further than most contractors expect, covering not just what officials say, but what job offers they accept and how long they must wait after leaving government service before cashing in with a contractor they once oversaw.
Background
The Procurement Integrity Act, codified at 41 U.S.C. §§ 2101-2107, was written to keep the competitive procurement process free of insider advantage. FAR Subpart 3.104 implements it, and it applies to both government officials and contractor personnel who might come into possession of protected information through improper channels. The rule sits alongside other FAR Part 3 integrity provisions — standards of conduct, contingent fees, whistleblower protections — but it is the one most directly tied to the mechanics of a live source selection, because it governs what happens to the information generated during evaluation and to the people who generate it once they leave government.
Two categories of protected information sit at the center of the rule. "Contractor bid or proposal information" covers cost or pricing data, indirect cost rates, proprietary manufacturing or process information, and any other data an offeror submits in confidence in connection with a bid. "Source selection information," defined at FAR 2.101, covers materials prepared for use in evaluating and selecting an awardee — technical evaluations, cost or price evaluations, competitive range determinations, rankings, source selection plans, and the like. Both categories lose their protection once the government makes them public through authorized release, so the rule targets premature or unauthorized disclosure, not information the agency has chosen to publish.
Key Details
The disclosure prohibition runs in both directions. An agency employee who reveals a competitor's proprietary pricing to a favored bidder violates the rule, and so does an offeror's employee who knowingly solicits or receives that same information from an agency contact. Only individuals the agency has specifically designated to receive bid, proposal, or source selection information may have it, and only for purposes tied to the procurement itself.
The Act's employment-contact provision catches officials mid-procurement, not after the fact. Any agency official who is participating personally and substantially in a procurement expected to exceed the simplified acquisition threshold and who receives a contact — even an informal one — about possible employment from a bidder or offeror in that procurement must report the contact promptly, in writing, to a supervisor and an agency ethics official. The official must then either reject the employment prospect outright or be recused from further participation in that procurement. There is no middle option; the choice has to be made and documented once the contact is reported.
Post-employment, the restriction tightens further for officials who held specific decision-making roles on contracts exceeding $10,000,000. Under 41 U.S.C. § 2104, a former procuring contracting officer, source selection authority, source selection evaluation board member, or chief of a financial or technical evaluation team may not accept compensation from that contractor for one year after the contractor's selection or the contract's award. Program managers, deputy program managers, and administrative contracting officers on such a contract face the same one-year bar, also running from award. A separate one-year clock applies to officials who personally decided to award, modify, or issue a task or delivery order over $10,000,000, or who set overhead rates, approved payments, or settled claims above that figure — for them, the bar runs one year from the date of the decision itself, not from contract award. The bar does not extend to a contractor division or affiliate that makes different products or services than the entity the official actually worked with — the restriction follows the specific business relationship, not the parent company as a whole.
Violations carry weight on both the criminal and administrative sides. The statute and its implementing FAR clauses expose violators to criminal penalties, and agencies can rescind the contract, recover improperly gained profits, and refer contractors or individuals for suspension or debarment. Contracting officers who suspect a violation must report it, and agencies are expected to act on credible allegations rather than wait for protest or litigation to force the issue.
What It Means for Contractors
Business development staff need to know exactly where the line sits before they pick up the phone during an active competition. A friendly call to a program office contact asking how the technical evaluation is trending, or a request to see where a competitor landed on price, is not harmless market intelligence — it is exactly the kind of contact the Act criminalizes if the person on the other end discloses anything not yet public. Contractors should train capture teams and proposal managers to treat any agency employee's offer to share unreleased evaluation details as a red flag to shut down immediately, not an opportunity to exploit.
The hiring side deserves equal attention. Companies that recruit recently departed contracting officers, program managers, or source selection officials need a clear process for checking whether that individual's prior role touched a contract exceeding $10,000,000 with the hiring company, and if so, whether the one-year clock — which runs from award or from a specific decision, depending on the role — has already expired. HR and legal should confirm this before an offer goes out, since the restriction binds the former official's ability to accept compensation, not merely to start work, so structuring the offer around a start date alone does not solve the problem.
Contractors currently competing for a procurement should also expect their own employees to receive unsolicited reports and recusal notices from agency counterparts who make employment contact with them. That is the system working as designed: an agency official who gets a call from your recruiter about a future role is required to report it and either turn down the conversation or step back from evaluating your proposal. Treat a sudden staffing change on an evaluation team as a possible signal that this process has already been triggered, and keep any employment discussions with agency personnel on a paper trail showing you did nothing to induce a violation. Given the rescission and profit-recapture remedies available, the safer posture is to over-report ambiguous contacts internally and let compliance counsel make the call before any conversation goes further.
