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Samarth Barot and Elizabeth N. Jochum
Office Depot, LLC
B-420482
- Office Depot challenged GSA’s attempt to use a single blanket purchase agreement to purchase both hardware/industrial supplies and office supplies, arguing that the evaluation scheme was unreasonable because it was predicated on consideration of incomplete historical sales information for the office supplies.
- The protester argued that the market basket to be used for evaluation was based on historical sales of hardware and industrial items, to the exclusion of data on office supplies, which resulted in a market basket which didn’t reasonably represent the likely purchases of office supplies.
- GAO agreed that the Agency had unreasonably relied on limited historical data regarding office supply sales to predict its future buying needs and that it had no (or virtually no) basis for forecasting estimated quantities of office supplies.
- GAO recommended GSA conduct additional market research and revise the solicitation with a reasonable representative sample of estimated hardware/industrial items and office supply purchases.