BNUMBER:  B-277048 
DATE:  August 21, 1997
TITLE: HSQ Technology, B-277048, August 21, 1997
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Matter of:HSQ Technology

File:     B-277048

Date:August 21, 1997

Paul H. Sanderford, Esq., Pratt & Sanderford, for the protester.
Gary M. Henningsen, Esq., and Catherine E. Barnum, Esq., Department of 
the Army, for the agency.
Wm. David Hasfurther, Esq., and Michael R. Golden, Esq., Office of the 
General 
Counsel, GAO, participated in the preparation of the decision.

DIGEST

Agency reasonably rejected proposal as unacceptable where proposal 
exceeded page limit set out in the solicitation and agency reasonably 
concluded that proposal without excess pages was unacceptable, since 
it lacked material sections of the technical proposal and the entire 
price proposal.

DECISION

HSQ Technology protests the rejection of its proposal to supply power 
plant controls for a dam system under Department of the Army request 
for proposals (RFP) No. DACW45-96-R-0050.  The agency excluded HSQ's 
proposal from further consideration because it contained substantially 
more pages than permitted under the RFP page limitation.  HSQ contends 
that, had the agency refrained from counting attachments and other 
items not subject to page limitations, its proposal would have been 
compliant. 

We deny the protest.

The RFP, issued on December 10, 1996, requested the submission of 
proposals consisting of four volumes:  (1) offer and other documents, 
(2) qualifications statement, (3) business management/technical, (4) 
and price.  The RFP set out the required print and page margin sizes 
and required that the overall proposals be "strictly limited" to 300 
pages.  It advised that submitting a proposal containing more than 300 
pages "will be considered failure to comply with solicitation 
requirements," and that such noncompliance "could result in 
elimination of the offer from the evaluation process."  The RFP also 
listed subelements to be evaluated under the business management and 
technical portions of the proposal.  Five proposals were received by 
the amended February 4, 1997, deadline for proposal submission.    

The agency reports that HSQ's proposal was rejected because the agency 
found that it contained approximately 591 pages (2 pages in volume I, 
12 pages in volume II, 572 pages in volume III, and 5 pages in volume 
IV).  The proposal contained numbered and unnumbered pages, with 
numbered pages interspersed among large blocks of unnumbered pages 
without any indication as to which portions of the submittal were 
intended for evaluation.  Because the proposal was put together in 
this way, the agency concluded that it could not determine which pages 
were intended to constitute the proposal and that a meaningful 
evaluation of it was impossible.  Further, the Army concluded that 
HSQ's proposal was outside the competitive range because the first 300 
pages of the proposal did not include all material parts of the 
business management/technical volume of HSQ's proposal or the pricing 
proposal.  

Offerors are generally required to establish the acceptability of 
their proposals within the format limitations set out in the 
solicitation, such as the page limit at issue here, and offerors 
assume the risk that proposal pages beyond the page limits will not be 
considered, since consideration of an offeror's excess proposal pages 
could give that offeror a competitive advantage.  All Star 
Maintenance, Inc., B-244143, Sept. 26, 1991, 91-2 CPD  para.  294 at 3-4; 
Infotec Dev., Inc., B-238980, July 20, 1990, 90-2 CPD  para.  58 at 4-5; see 
also Management & Indus. Techs. Assocs., B-257656, Oct. 11, 1994, 94-2 
CPD  para.  134 at 3.  Nonetheless, where the solicitation states--as is the 
case here--that a proposal exceeding a page limit "could" be excluded 
from consideration, such a proposal may properly be rejected only if 
there is a reasonable basis for the rejection, such as where the 
proposal is found unacceptable (or outside the competitive range) when 
it is evaluated without consideration of pages in excess of the page 
limit.  Macfadden & Assocs., Inc., B-275502, Feb. 27, 1997, 97-1 CPD  para.  
88 at 3-4.  

HSQ contends that its proposal contained fewer than 300 pages and 
relies on a recent decision of our Office, Macfadden & Assocs., Inc., 
supra, to argue that the agency's rejection of its proposal was 
improper.  In Macfadden, we found that, where an offeror's proposal 
was within the solicitation's page limitation, the agency could not 
automatically reject the proposal simply because, together with its 
appendices, it exceeded the page limit.

HSQ contends that its proposal, like the one at issue in Macfadden, 
complied with the page limitation.  The protester argues that the 
agency improperly counted the cover pages, table of contents, and 
attachments, and that the proposal itself actually contained only  278 
pages--of which 265 were in the business management/technical volume 
of the proposal.  HSQ does not explain how it reached this figure of 
265.  Our Office's review of that volume alone found 321 pages, 
without counting cover sheets, tables of contents, or pages labelled 
as attachments.  The 321 figure counts as single pages eight folded 
charts/diagrams, even though, when unfolded, each of those charts or 
diagrams would appear to count as two pages under the RFP format 
limitations.  Our count of 321 also does not take into account the 
fact that some proposal pages had margins smaller than permitted by 
the RFP, correction of which would increase the number of pages in 
this volume.  Accordingly, even accepting the protester's position 
that the agency should ignore certain pages, such as cover sheets, 
tables of contents, and attachments, HSQ's business 
management/technical volume alone still exceeds the 300-page 
limitation by at least 21 pages.  

In any event, this case is distinguishable from Macfadden.  In 
Macfadden, we held that it was improper for the agency to 
automatically reject the proposal without evaluating whether the pages 
within the 100-page proposal limitation at issue in that case (the 
proposal without its appendices) was acceptable.  Our review of the 
proposal at issue in Macfadden indicated that there was nothing on the 
face of the proposal to indicate that it could not be acceptable if 
only the pages within the page limit were evaluated.  Id. at 3.  In 
HSQ's case, the agency had a reasonable basis for its finding that 
evaluating only the first 300 pages meant that the proposal was 
unacceptable.[1]  Specifically, by our count, after including the 
pages of volumes I and II (which total, even by the protester's count, 
nine pages), and the first 291 pages of volume III (to reach the 
300-page limit), a part of the proposal addressing the training 
subelement and the entire documentation/project schedule subelement of 
the technical support element--which were requirements under the 
RFP--as well as the price proposal are outside the page limit and thus 
were reasonably excluded from the proposal evaluation.  In view of 
these material omissions, which would require major revisions by HSQ 
to make its proposal acceptable, we think the agency reasonably 
concluded that HSQ's proposal was unacceptable and outside the 
competitive range.  See Infotec Dev., Inc., supra.

The protest is denied.

Comptroller General
of the United States

1. In this case, moreover, there were pages throughout HSQ's proposal 
that the protester admits should be counted interspersed among pages 
that it now argues should not be counted.  In our view, it is not 
reasonable to impose on an agency that has set out a clear page 
limitation in a solicitation the obligation of sorting through 
hundreds of pages to decide which pages should and should not be 
counted toward that limitation.