BNUMBER:  B-271492.2
DATE:  November 27, 1996
TITLE:  Department of the Army--Reconsideration

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Matter of:Department of the Army--Reconsideration

File:     B-271492.2

Date:November 27, 1996

Donald E. Goodroe for the protester.
Maj. Michael J. O'Farrell, Jr., Department of the Army, for the 
agency.
Adam Vodraska, Esq., and James A. Spangenberg, Esq., Office of the 
General Counsel, GAO, participated in the preparation of the decision.

DIGEST

Request for reconsideration by an agency is denied where the factual 
errors it identified and the new information it provided do not 
warrant reversal or modification of the decision sustaining the 
protest.

DECISION

The Department of the Army requests reconsideration of our decision 
S.D.M. Supply, Inc., B-271492, June 26, 1996, 96-1 CPD  para.  288, which 
sustained the protest of S.D.M Supply, Inc. against the issuance of 
purchase order No. DABT01-96-V-0248 to New Pig Corporation under 
request for quotations (RFQ) No. DABT01-96-T-0112  by the U.S. Army 
Aviation Center, Fort Rucker, Alabama, for a quantity of aerosol can 
puncturing systems.  

We deny the reconsideration request.

This small purchase RFQ was issued and responses were invited to be 
submitted through the Federal Acquisition Computer Network (FACNET).  
S.D.M. protested that the agency failed to consider its low-priced 
quote to the agency submitted through FACNET.  The agency did not 
consider S.D.M.'s quote because it was unaware it had received it due 
to a computer system problem.  We sustained the protest because the 
record evidenced that the agency failed to satisfy its obligation 
under the Competition in Contracting Act of 1984, 10 U.S.C.  sec.  
2304(g)(3) (1994), to promote competition to the maximum extent 
practicable, inasmuch as the agency did not have adequate procedures 
in place to ensure that quotations received through FACNET would be 
considered.  See East West Research Inc., B-239565; B-239566, Aug. 21, 
1990, 90-2 CPD  para.  147, aff'd, Defense Logistics Agency--Recon., 
B-239565.2; B-239566.2, Mar. 19, 1991, 91-1 CPD  para.  298.  Specifically, 
we found that the agency's loss of the protester's quotation was due 
to a systemic failure that resulted in the loss of all other 
quotations submitted for this RFQ through FACNET and that similar 
systemic failures have occurred for other RFQs issued by 
Ft. Rucker.

The Army first asserts that the following statements made on pages 2 
and 3 of the decision contain factual errors and these errors may have 
caused our Office to erroneously sustain the protest.  The contested 
statements are:

     "[a]ll transactions conducted over FACNET, except the issuance of 
     RFQs, are acknowledged automatically by the end of the business 
     day following the arrival of the transmission at its destination 
     to notify the sender as to whether a transaction has been 
     received, e.g., to notify a trading partner that its quotation 
     has been received by the contracting agency."

     "quotations . . . were received by the Standard Army Automated 
     Contracting System (SAACONS) government computer gateway located 
     at Fort Lee, Virginia, and relayed to Fort Rucker."

     "the acknowledgment received by S.D.M. was generated by the 
     SAACONS government gateway. . . ."

The Army states that there is no true end-to-end confirmation of the 
receipt of quotations over FACNET from the contracting office to the 
quoting trading partner, as it thinks was implied by the first of 
these statements.[1]  Rather, according to the Army, once a government 
gateway computer receives a quotation from a trading partner such as 
S.D.M., the gateway computer sends an acknowledgment back to the 
trading partner through the trading partner's Value Added Network 
(VAN) to confirm that the quotation has been received at the gateway 
and that the quotation has been retransmitted to its intended 
destination; in other words, this notice from the gateway computer 
does not verify that the contracting activity has actually received 
the quotation submitted over FACNET.

The Army also explains that the government computer gateway which 
processes the Army's FACNET transactions, and which acknowledged 
S.D.M.'s quote, is the Standard Automated Contracting System (SACONS) 
operated by the Defense Information Systems Agency, not SAACONS, as 
identified in the decision.[2]  In this regard, the Army points out 
that it does not control the entire FACNET infrastructure and that 
problems can occur at the SACONS government computer gateway which 
might affect the receipt of quotations at an Army contracting 
activity, such as Ft. Rucker, despite the gateway's acknowledgment of 
the receipt of a trading partner's quotation.  Specifically, according 
to the Army, if a "corrupted" data file is received by the SACONS 
gateway from a VAN and is passed on by the gateway to the contracting 
activity, or if data is "corrupted" during the "translation" of the 
data file by the gateway into a "flat file" for transmission and is 
then passed on to the contracting activity, the contracting activity 
may not know that the "corrupted" data or any subsequent quotations 
have been received in its system where the corrupted data caused a 
system "logjam,"[3] as the Army asserts happened in this case.[4]

First, our mistaken use of the acronym SAACONS instead of the acronym 
SACONS in referring to the government computer gateway does not 
warrant changing our decision.  Although SACONS is operated by an 
agency other than the Army, our point was that the acknowledgment 
received by S.D.M. was generated by the government gateway computer, 
which evidenced that S.D.M.'s quote had been received by the 
government in FACNET, and not the protester's VAN, as had been earlier 
asserted by the agency when it denied there was any evidence 
supporting the government's receipt of S.D.M.'s quote.  

Moreover, while, as recognized in our prior decision, the technical 
problem which prevented the electronic quotations from being 
considered by Ft. Rucker was with the FACNET system itself, not Ft. 
Rucker's computer system, this does not change the fact that the 
quotations, including the protester's, were actually received by the 
Army in the Ft. Rucker computer system, as stated in the decision, but 
had not been retrieved from that system.  Contrary to the agency's 
argument, the decision did not imply that Ft. Rucker itself had 
acknowledged receipt of S.D.M.'s quotation, but correctly stated that 
S.D.M.'s quotation was acknowledged by the government computer gateway 
and re-transmitted to Ft. Rucker, and that the Ft. Rucker contracting 
office was unaware that the quotations were in its computer system 
because of the above-described technical problem.  

Thus, the misstatements in our prior decision did not affect our 
disposition of S.D.M.'s protest.
    
The Army also asserts that our basis for sustaining the protest--that 
the agency did not have adequate procedures in place to ensure the 
consideration of quotations received through FACNET--was based on 
inaccurately reported statements attributed to agency personnel during 
the unrecorded telephonic hearing conducted by our Office.[5]  The 
Army has provided affidavits from the Ft. Rucker contracting personnel 
who participated in the hearing disputing the statements on page 4 of 
the decision that they had previously experienced the occurrence of 
the identical problem and that they "were inexperienced with the 
computer system, [and] failed to check available computer system 
status reports, which would have indicated the existence of the 
problem."  These affidavits evidence that the contracting personnel at 
Ft. Rucker checked for the receipt of electronic quotations for this 
RFQ both before the placement of the purchase order when they realized 
that had received none, and again when they became aware that 
quotations that had been submitted had not been received.  An 
affidavit of the computer systems administrator for the purchasing 
office shows that despite her search of the Ft. Rucker computer system 
for FACNET quotations at the request of contracting officials both 
before and after the issuance of the purchase order, and her 
subsequent discovery of the "backlog" of quotations, she was unable to 
retrieve the quotations because of the above-described technical 
problem, and that she asked for assistance from SAACONS personnel.  
The affidavits finally assert that "this particular problem was the 
first of its kind for Ft. Rucker," although it "has experienced 
technical problems before with" FACNET.

While this may have been the first time the source of the problem 
preventing the receipt of quotations at Ft. Rucker was specifically 
identified to the Ft. Rucker contracting personnel by SAACONS 
personnel, the Ft. Rucker contracting personnel do not deny in their 
affidavits that they reported at the hearing that Ft. Rucker had 
previously experienced problems with the receipt of quotations over 
FACNET, including the loss of quotations, as was stated in our 
decision.  Moreover, in his affidavit, the SAACONS technician who 
participated in the hearing admits that the same problem has occurred 
at other installations--this supports our conclusion that the agency's 
failure to consider the protester's quotation was due to a previously 
identified systemic problem.  In any case, we find nothing in the 
affidavits from the agency personnel that is inconsistent with our 
attorney's recollection, as confirmed by the protester, that the 
SAACONS technician stated at the hearing that the quotations were 
actually in the Ft. Rucker computer, but that Ft. Rucker's computer 
systems administrator was unfamiliar or inexperienced with the 
computer functions necessary to retrieve the data.  In this regard, 
the SAACONS technician indicated that available computer system status 
reports would have alerted contracting personnel to the technical 
problem preventing the receipt of quotations.

Despite the apparent availability of preventive measures and the 
problems it has experienced with FACNET, the Army had not implemented 
procedures designed to notify contracting personnel of technical 
problems that might prevent the timely consideration of quotations 
submitted through FACNET.   Indeed, the supervisor of the Ft. Rucker 
purchasing office states in her affidavit that no guidance or training 
had been provided to her office in this regard.  The Army informs us 
that it has now implemented procedures to prevent the same problem 
from recurring, which include sending a computer message if an error 
occurs, printing reports automatically to alert users to the 
processing status, and advising users to check these reports.  
Nonetheless, the evidence presented here by the Army supports our 
basis for sustaining the protest, namely that the Army did not have 
adequate procedures in place to ensure that quotations received 
through FACNET would be fairly considered, and thus failed to promote 
competition to the maximum extent practicable.

To prevail on a request for reconsideration, the requesting party must 
show that our prior decision contains either errors of fact or law or 
present information not previously considered that warrants reversal 
or modification of our decision.  4 C.F.R.  sec.  21.14 (1996).  Since 
neither the new information provided by the Army nor the factual 
errors it identified warrant reversal or modification of our decision, 
the request for reconsideration is denied.

Comptroller General
of the United States

1. Our statement was based on information contained in the Federal 
Electronic Commerce Acquisition Instructions supplied by the 
protester, which it had obtained from the Department of Defense 
Electronic Commerce Information Center.  The Instructions stated that 
"[i]t is a function of the automated process that an [acknowledgment] 
will be transmitted by the end of the business day following the 
arrival of the transmission in the recipient's mailbox to notify the 
sender that [a] transaction has been accepted or rejected."  This 
statement clearly refers to acknowledgments generated by the 
government, which is what was at issue in this case.  In addition, we 
note that trading partners are instructed to send acknowledgments for 
all transactions, except RFQs, at the time they are received.

2. The Army states that SAACONS is not a government computer gateway, 
but is the Army's automated contracting software and hardware business 
system, which, along with other government business systems, is 
supported by the SACONS gateway.  The SACONS government computer 
gateway is located in Columbus, Ohio, and not at Fort Lee, Virginia, 
as stated in the decision; Fort Lee is where the Army office 
responsible for maintenance, testing, distribution and customer 
support for SAACONS is located. 

3. Such a "logjam" apparently permits no FACNET quotes to be 
retrievable from the local activity's computer system until the 
"logjam" is cleared.

4. Because the Army failed to provide such factual background in its 
report submitted for the protest, our office conducted a telephonic 
hearing with the protester and agency personnel to gather information 
on how the quotations transmitted over FACNET were "lost" in this 
case.

5. Our hearings are generally recorded.