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Q. Is the Vendor List pubic information and available to all potential proposers between the pre-proposal conference and the submittal of proposals? Is the short list public information at the time of interviews during a personal services RFP? Why would we want the vendors to know how many and who the competition is?
A. The list of companies solicited by your agency would be useful to those firms that want to offer their services as subcontractors to potential primes. This could be especially helpful to small and disadvantaged businesses. For these reasons it has been the Federal practice to publicly release the names of all firms solicited for proposals. The information about which companies actually submitted proposals, and those companies evaluated as being on the short list for negotiations, would not normally be released. As you suggest, it could be detrimental to the competitive environment to release this information, and it would not serve the interests of potential subcontractors at that point since the proposals (identifying the various teams members) have already been submitted.
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Q. We had issued a 2-Step IFB for Signals and Communication.
We received technical offers on 6-2-04 and we recorded it as an internal process, i.e. we did not disclose the information to anyone outside our Evaluation committee and Senior Agency members. Now, two DBE firms have been requesting that we disclose the names of the technical offerors. Per the BPPM, we are not required to disclose this information. Neither do our State laws require any such disclosure. The DBE firms are being forceful about their request. I'll appreciate your input.
A. We would counsel you not to disclose the identity of the offerors prior to award. We are sending you a draft of our revised BPPM section on Debriefing, and you will note the advice not to disclose the identity of the offerors to a company prior to award. This is based on the new FAR coverage on Debriefings at FAR 15.505. We know this is not a debriefing, but the same principles apply. As an alternative, we would suggest you give the DBE firms the names of the companies you sent the solicitation to, and the names of companies that attended the preproposal conference.
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