Competition In Contracting Act (CICA)

What Is the Competition In Contracting Act?

Competition In Contracting Act is a policy laid out by Congress in 1984 to energize competition for government contracts. The thought behind the policy is that the increased competition will bring about better savings to the government through more competitive pricing. The Act applies to all solicitations for bids issued after April 1, 1985.

Grasping the Competition In Contracting Act (CICA)

The CICA accommodates full and open competition in the awarding of government contracts. The technique incorporates fixed bidding and competitive proposition. CICA orders that any contract expected to be greater than $25,000 must be advertised no less than 15 days prior to bid solicitation. This advertising is planned to increase the number of bidders seeking government contracts, subsequently taking into consideration full and open competition. CICA required the government to follow these procedures with limited special cases; any takeoff from CICA must be recorded and approved by the fitting government official.

How CICA Works

"The theory was that more competition for procurements would reduce costs and permit all the more small organizations to win Federal Government contracts. Under CICA all procurements must be contended as full and open so any qualified company can present an offer," as per the General Services Administration, an independent agency in charge of IU.S. government procurement.

CICA requires every agency and getting activity to lay out a "competition advocate" inside its organization to survey and challenge any procurement that limits competition. At the Congressional level, another Senate subcommittee was laid out to regulate implementation of CICA and energize competition for government contracts.

CICA likewise settled that a protest before contract award to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) will make the award be suspended until GAO rules on the protest. It laid out a cutoff time of 90 working days for GAO to issue a ruling or 45 calendar days in the event that the express option is mentioned by one or the other party.

This provision has been a point of dispute throughout the years due to trivial protests being recorded, as per a research paper distributed in the Journal of Contract Management. "While authentic protests test the integrity of the award interaction, trivial protests just test the belligerent will of the Government and effective contractors. At the point when contractors submit silly protests they are taking advantage of the protest mechanism to block competition. Previous Office of Procurement Policy (OFPP) Administrator Steven Kelman was a pundit of this double-dealing. He found that protests were tedious and costly, delivered organizations unreasonably risk-opposed, and diminished goodwill and association. At the end of the day, protests upset the Government-contractor relationship."