The Government Accountability Office has ordered the Department of Veterans Affairs to redo its past-performance evaluation on a $2.4 million acquisition-support-services order, ruling in a decision published July 10 that contracting staff illegally threw out relevant contractor history simply because it was more than three years old.
Background
The VA's Veterans Health Administration issued RFQ No. 36C24926Q0036 on Nov. 19, 2025, seeking acquisition-support services under the Federal Acquisition Regulation's simplified Subpart 8.4 procedures for orders placed against the Federal Supply Schedule. The agency structured the buy as a firm-fixed-price order with a one-year period of performance and drew 43 quotations from vendors holding General Services Administration schedule contracts.
Two service-disabled veteran-owned small businesses ended up as the finalists: Dynamic Management Associates, LLC (DMA) of Woodbridge, Virginia, and Veterans Management Services, Inc. (VMSI) of Sterling, Virginia. The VA first selected DMA in late 2025, and VMSI protested that initial award. Rather than defend it before GAO, the agency took corrective action, went back and re-evaluated the field of quotations, and landed on DMA again on March 5, 2026. VMSI protested a second time, arguing the re-evaluation repeated the same flaw that prompted the corrective action in the first place. That second protest, docketed as B-424182.2 and B-424182.3, is the one GAO resolved June 22 and posted publicly on July 10.
Because both finalists carry SDVOSB status, the dispute did not turn on set-aside eligibility or size-standard questions. It turned entirely on whether the VA's evaluators followed the methodology the solicitation itself promised to vendors — specifically, how much weight older contract-performance history should receive relative to price.
Key Details
DMA's quotation priced the work at $2,432,378, undercutting VMSI's $2,997,106 bid by roughly $565,000. Because the RFQ weighted past performance equally with price, the evaluation of each firm's contract history carried real weight in the source-selection outcome.
GAO's sustained finding centers on how the contracting officer handled that history. The solicitation told vendors that contract performance completed within the past three years "may be viewed more favorably" than older performance — language that, on its face, allows older CPARS records into the evaluation with reduced weight rather than excluding them outright. GAO found the contracting officer instead filtered out and refused to evaluate any Contractor Performance Assessment Reporting System entries older than three years, including four VMSI references rated "exceptional" or "very good." GAO wrote that treating the cutoff as an automatic bar rendered the solicitation's stated evaluation approach meaningless and created competitive prejudice, since VMSI's excluded references could plausibly have improved its standing in a factor that carried equal weight with price.
GAO denied a second protest ground. VMSI had argued DMA's quotation should have been rejected outright over an inconsistency in how DMA stated its proposed period of performance, contending the discrepancy made the quotation technically unacceptable. GAO reviewed the record and found VMSI failed to show that the discrepancy caused it any competitive harm or changed the outcome of the competition, so that portion of the award was left to stand.
As a remedy, GAO directed the VA to take corrective action a second time: either amend the solicitation to clarify the look-back treatment and reopen the competition, or reevaluate past performance consistent with the RFQ's actual terms as written. GAO also ordered the agency to reimburse VMSI's reasonable costs of filing and pursuing the protest, including reasonable attorney's fees, a remedy GAO reserves for cases where the agency's error was clear enough that the protester should not have had to bear its own litigation costs.
What It Means for Contractors
The decision is a reminder that a solicitation's precise wording on evaluation windows is enforceable, not boilerplate. When an RFQ says older experience "may be viewed more favorably" rather than "will not be considered," GAO expects agencies to actually weigh that older data at reduced value, not discard it. Contracting officers who build informal cutoffs into their evaluation process, even ones that seem administratively convenient, risk a sustained protest if the solicitation language doesn't match the practice.
For offerors, the case underscores the value of building a complete past-performance record into a proposal even when some of the strongest references sit just outside a stated look-back window. VMSI's four "exceptional" and "very good" CPARS ratings were old enough to fall outside the three-year mark, but the RFQ's own language kept them in play, and GAO agreed they should have counted for something. Contractors bidding on VA task orders, and on any FAR Subpart 8.4 order where past performance is weighted against price, should read look-back language literally and be prepared to protest if an agency applies a harder cutoff than the solicitation actually states.
The case also illustrates the practical cost of corrective action that doesn't fix the underlying problem. The VA's first round of corrective action, taken after VMSI's initial protest, still produced the same CPARS-cutoff error and the same awardee, meaning the agency now faces a third look at the same requirement, on top of paying VMSI's protest costs from the second round. Agencies revisiting an evaluation after corrective action should audit the specific finding a protester raised rather than simply rerunning the same process and expecting a different result.
Finally, because both competitors here were SDVOSBs, the decision has no bearing on set-aside eligibility disputes; it turns entirely on evaluation-methodology compliance. Contractors competing in SDVOSB or other small-business set-asides should treat this as a template for how to frame a past-performance protest: point to the exact solicitation language, show the agency's practice diverged from it, and demonstrate that the divergence could plausibly have changed the outcome given the weighting scheme.
The dollar amounts involved are modest by federal contracting standards, but the procedural lesson scales well beyond a single VHA task order. Any solicitation that uses qualifying language around a past-performance look-back period — "may be viewed more favorably," "will receive greater weight," or similar phrasing — is inviting a graduated evaluation, not a hard cutoff. Contracting officers under deadline pressure sometimes build simpler pass/fail filters into their evaluation worksheets to speed source selection, and this decision shows GAO will unwind that shortcut when it conflicts with the solicitation's own words. Firms that believe an agency screened out relevant CPARS records now have a directly on-point precedent to cite in a supplemental protest, and should request the underlying evaluation documentation early to confirm whether older ratings were weighed at reduced value or never reached the evaluators at all.
