Government Contracts Compliance: Enhancing and Challenging Past Performance Assessments

Past performance assessments are often a predictive performance capability key evaluation factor reliant upon assessments of relevant and recent experience of the prime contractor, its subcontractors, and/or a joint venture as specified in a solicitation. Indeed, a contractor’s past performance questionnaires, references, and Contractor Past Performance Assessment Reports (“CPARS”) even where not specified in a contract are often “too close at hand” for the agency to reasonably ignore. 

This 1 hour webinar will discuss the range of source selection rules and factors that govern critical past performance term proposal evaluations stipulations by federal agencies to assist in pre-award win strategies and protest considerations where an agency seems to have not followed stipulated past performance assessments relating to your company’s proposals or that of competitors contained in its own solicitations or the terms of its own solicitation.

1.      During the market research phase and/or in relation to other contractors permitted communication exchanges with a procuring agency; the contractor should be advised to seek to assure that the prime contractor’s past performance record will not only assessed.

2.      Strategies and the process applicable to challenging unreasonable and/or negative CPARS report cards by phases or in total.

3.      Strategies for past performance proposal submissions where a negative past performance reference is provided by a prior agency customer or where CPARS challenges are unsuccessful but are a critical basis for proposed relevant and recent experience.

4.      Key considerations when determining whether to submit a proposal dependent on negative evaluations of recent and relevant opportunities.

5.      Key considerations when assessing trade-off award basis to determine whether technically proposals evaluation factors and pricing strategies can overcome deficient recent and relative past performance assessments.

6.      Key considerations for protests of an agency's unreasonable balancing of positive and negative past performance evaluation assessments by an agency to including consideration of non-stipulated past performance evaluation solicitation requirements.

7.      Key considerations for reviews of a competitors recent and relevant past performance as may be publicized on a competitor’s past performance assessments published past performance concerns associated with prime contracts and assessments of prior contracts performed by prime contractors via the Federal Procurement Data System (“FPDS”) to protest a the recency and relevancy of a competitors’ past performance proposals, at a minimum.

This program will help executives, corporate counsel and compliance officers of U.S. companies that are selling through the US (overseas) supply chain understand pre-award strategies for challenging pat performance assessments, how to mitigate negative past performance assessments and considerations for challenging a procuring agency’s unreasonable evaluations of their company’s or a competitor’s publicly accessible past performance assessments along with the relevance and recency of a competitor’s past performance experience.

About the Instructor

Jerry Alfonso Miles, Esq., Managing Principal of Deale Services, LLC a highly competitively, alternatively priced law firm, is a government contract, corporate, commercial litigation and employment attorney with experience a corporate counsel for a Fortune 50 government contractor, a large law firm and as a private practitioner with experience serving over one hundred small, midsize, and large businesses. Mr. Miles regularly advises clients on teaming relationships; subcontracting; bid protests; government disputes; international compliance; corporate compliance; mergers and acquisitions arbitration; litigation; audits and investigations; considerations for managing costs, maintaining profits and getting paid faster; suspension and debarments; and, employment agreements along with dispute resolution.