Two companies have filed a protest with the Government Accountability Office against the Homeland Security Department's pick of CACI as the contractor for a controversial enterprise planning resource system.

DHS announced it had awarded the Arlington, Va.-based company a $450 million contract to implement the ERP--known as Transformation and Systems Consolidation--on Nov. 19. The two protestors, Global Computer Enterprises of Reston, Va. and Savantage Financial Services of Rockville, Md., filed with the GAO on Nov. 30.

The watchdog agency gives itself up to 100 days to issue a protest decision (assuming the protest makes it that far in the evaluation process), meaning that a ruling would be due no later than March 10, 2011.

Agencies aren't legally bound to follow GAO protest decisions, although in practice, they almost always do. From federal fiscal year 2000 through 2009, agencies ignored the GAO exactly five times, which amounts almost .04 percent of all resolved cases.

This marks the third or fourth time Savantage has objected in an official venue to DHS TASC plans. The company successfully forced DHS in 2008 through a Court of Federal Claims lawsuit to rewrite the original TASC request for proposals on the grounds the solicitation constituted an improper sole-source procurement, because it required migration to an Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) or SAP system.

When DHS issued a new RFP in January 2009, Savantage sued again on similar grounds, charging that the solicitation again restricted competition. The Court of Federal Claims ruled against Savantage in April 2009 and when the company appealed to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, that venue likewise rejected Savantage's case in a Feb 2010 opinion.

Savantage's contention that DHS should first implement a core financial system and then separately integrate feeder systems, since standing up a fully integrated system at the outset is the more difficult option, addressed a matter of agency preference and "an agency's preferences are entitled to great weight," said the court of appeals in its decision.

Also, the TASC solicitation requirement that the solution be already operating successfully within the federal government is understandable given the $52 million failure of a DHS previous attempt to craft a new system from commercial-off-the-shelf components (called eMerge2), the court of appeals added.

The court also rejected Savantage's contention that the TASC solicitation was a barely-disguised attempt to ensure procurement of an Oracle-based system. Savantage said the solicitation contained an "unstated requirement" requiring the TASC solution to integrate data from Compusearch's PRISM acquisition management system and Sunflower Systems' asset management system, a requirement which only an Oracle system could achieve. Savantage's assertion that DHS is committed to integrating PRISM and Sunflower components "is speculative and lacks support in the record," was the court's opinion.

For more:
- go to the GAO bid protest docket search page - Global Computer Enterprise's file number is 404597.1 and Savantage's is 404597.2
- go to the DHS TASC solicitation on FBO
- read the Feb 2010 Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit opinion on Savantage v. United States

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