It seems that everyone wants to produce their own version of a proposal adequacy checklist. Late last year, we reported on DoD's proposed regulation that will add a proposal checklist to its FAR Supplement. Shortly after that, we reported on DCAA's (Defense Contract Audit Agency) revised proposal adequacy checklist. AS we noted, there wasn't a whole lot of difference between the two and probably nothing that would be considered substantive.
It recently came to our attention that DCMA (Defense Contract Management Agency) has its own version of a proposal adequacy checklist. Again, there are a lot of similarities between this version and the one published as a proposed regulation. The DCMA checklist has two things going for it that make it a worthwhile investment for contractors to utilize when preparing and submitting price proposals to the Government.
- It includes comments and explanations for some of the checklist items as a means of clarifying the question and its purpose and intent.
- It is the checklist that DCMA uses to assess the adequacy of a proposal. As regular readers of this blog know, the responsibility for reviewing the bulk of contractor proposals (everything under $10 firm fixed price and under $100 million cost reimbursable) was shifted from DCAA to DCMA.
These checklists are for sole-source procurement where cost or pricing data is required. We don't have a sufficient data set to fully understand what happens when a proposal fails in one or more checklist elements. It could depend on the severity of the deficiency the exercise of sound judgment on the part of the individual performing the adequacy review. In some cases, the Government will simply request prospective contractors to "fix" the inadequacy. In extreme cases, the proposal might be returned for major rework.
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