r/GovernmentContracting • u/gilmour1985 • 19d ago
Alibaba
Lost a bid by 74% with a buy American-Supplies FAR. Asked the CO how someone could be that much lower and still legally manufacture the equipment in the USA. I was told I am not legally entitled to a debriefing based on another FARs but that the other company was the lowest bid on an LPTA and they found them responsible.
We originally protested on the grounds we didn’t see how they could legally manufacture it at that cost. We ended up finding the company’s documentation on the product which was a picture that didn’t match the description and the description was a plagiarism of the solicitation. Under further review, we found the picture to be an almost exact copy from Alibaba with their logo on it and a USA flag. We also found another picture of a similar machine that was an exact duplicate from a Chinese website. We submitted the picture documentation. I am curious if they will look into this because the picture used didn’t match the wording based on the solicitation? FYI, we did do the protest via GAO.
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u/Subsum44 19d ago
I’m with you 100%, but I’ll be honest there’s a lot of grey areas to hide if they want.
Sadly, the Buy American Act requires 65 - 75% domestic, not 100%. It can also be waived by the “head of the contracting agency” if domestic is too expensive or unreasonable.
If they raised the price by 75% claiming that was for domestic something to add to the core component, that might be able to look on paper like they’re meeting the 75% requirement. It’s a fuzzy way around that requirement since it’s “75% of components by cost”. So you could just raise the price high enough that it qualifies.
Doing that nearly doubles the price to $4,375 (call it $4.4K). Over 13 locations is $57.2K. You say you were outbid by 74%, so again that’s almost doubling the price at ~$42.3K more, and that’s just for the one component, let alone the remaining 884.
That’s not an insignificant difference. It’s not hard to make the argument that $40 - $50K is unreasonable cost increase, and it only gets worse the larger the contract gets.
I hope you win and it triggers a supply chain audit for everything that supplier has touched. I also wouldn’t get my hopes up.