Two companies quoted on the same Homeland Security work. One of them had been doing the job. The prices came in $34,802.74 apart on quotes of roughly $19.9 million each, which is a gap of about seventeen hundredths of one percent, and that gap decided it.
The incumbent asked the Government Accountability Office to look at that. GAO looked, and told it that being the incumbent is worth nothing.
The Numbers That Decided It
DHS issued RFQ number 70RTAC25Q00000042 on August 12, 2025 for comprehensive geospatial enterprise technical expertise and contractor support services, a hybrid fixed price and time and materials call order under Federal Supply Schedule procedures, base year plus one option year.
Two total evaluated prices came out of it.
The evaluation factors were ranked. Technical approach was most important. Management and staffing plan and experience were equal to each other and less important than technical. Price was significantly less important than the non price factors combined.
Price was the least important thing on the list, and price is the only thing that separated them, because the agency found the two quotations essentially equal on everything above it.
The Merry Go Round
This award has been handed out twice, to two different companies.
On September 29, 2025 DHS awarded to Integrity. On October 13, 2025 ASET protested that award at the Court of Federal Claims. The agency took corrective action, amended the solicitation, ran it again, and on May 1, 2026 reissued the award to ASET. Integrity filed at GAO on May 8, 2026.
Eight months, one court protest, one corrective action, one re award, one GAO protest, and at the end of it the work goes to the company whose quote was thirty four thousand dollars cheaper on a twenty million dollar buy.
No Extra Credit For Doing The Job
Integrity's central complaint was that the agency failed to assess additional strengths to its quotation. It had the contract. It proposed uninterrupted service delivery with proven staff. It pointed at its own contractor performance assessment reporting system record.
GAO denied all of it, and the sentence worth writing down is this one: there is no requirement that an incumbent be given extra credit for its status as an incumbent.
The CPARS argument failed for a separate and even simpler reason. Past performance was not an evaluation criterion in this solicitation. A company cannot win points on a factor the agency never said it would score.
The same logic killed the management and staffing challenge. The selection official found the two approaches essentially equivalent and declined to award extra credit for exceeding requirements. Proposing more than what was asked for is not the same as being rated higher for it.
The Part That Was Never Heard
Integrity's strongest sounding ground, that the agency evaluated the two quotations disparately on technical approach and experience, was never decided at all. It was dismissed as untimely, and the timeline is worth walking through because this is how a good argument dies on a calendar.
The information underpinning those allegations was available to Integrity during the earlier Court of Federal Claims protest, filed back in October 2025. On May 13, 2026 the court authorized Integrity to use the protected materials in its GAO protest. GAO's rule gives a protester ten days from when it knows or should know its basis. That put the deadline at May 26, 2026.
Integrity raised those challenges on June 18, 2026, in its comments on the agency report, twenty three days late.
Nobody will ever know whether the disparate evaluation argument had anything in it. That is the cost of the filing calendar and it is entirely on the protester.
What The Agency Did Right
It is easy to read a denial as GAO rubber stamping an agency, so it is worth being specific about what the record actually showed here, because it is the opposite of the usual complaint.
The selection official did not stop at adjectival ratings. The decision documents that ASET outlined a nine step methodology for implementing Geospatial Information Infrastructure native products, and that Integrity demonstrated experience with the GMO Enterprise Management System. Those are two specific findings about two specific quotations, not two adjectives in a table.
Having looked past the ratings and found no meaningful difference between the quotations, the official picked the cheaper one. On a solicitation where price is the least important factor, that is exactly what you do when everything above price comes out tied.
Why This One Is Worth Keeping
Three things come out of B-424490 that are useful the next time somebody loses a recompete.
Incumbency is not a strength. Not a small one, not a tiebreaker, not worth an extra sentence in the evaluation. If the solicitation does not say the agency will credit continuity, it will not.
Do not argue on a factor that is not in the solicitation. CPARS is a real record of real performance and it was irrelevant here because past performance was not being evaluated. Read the factor list before building an argument.
The ten day clock starts when you learn the facts, not when you finish thinking about them. Integrity had the material on May 13 and filed on June 18. The best ground in the protest was gone before anybody read it.
The Numbers
File number B-424490. Protester Integrity Management Consulting, Inc., of McLean, Virginia. Awardee and intervenor ASET Partners Corporation, of Alexandria, Virginia. Agency, Department of Homeland Security. Solicitation RFQ number 70RTAC25Q00000042. Decided August 13, 2026 by General Counsel Edda Emmanuelli Perez, published on GAO's recent decisions list on August 25, 2026. Protest dismissed in part and denied in part. The award to ASET stands.
Counsel for the protester: Thomas K. David, Kenneth D. Brody, Lewis P. Rhodes and Katherine A. David of Reston Law Group, LLP. For the intervenor: Daniel J. Strouse and Anna Dichter of Cordatis LLP. For the agency: Victoria R. Roth and Peter G. Hartman. GAO attorneys: Janis R. Millete and John Sorrenti.