Overview
FAR 9.202 outlines the strict administrative requirements and justifications an agency must satisfy before establishing qualification requirements that limit competition. The policy seeks to balance the government's need for verified quality and safety with the statutory mandate to maintain full and open competition by ensuring such requirements are necessary, transparent, and periodically revalidated.
Key Rules
- Written Justification: Before establishing a qualification requirement, the agency head must prepare a written justification detailing the necessity of the requirement, estimated testing costs for offerors, and specific standards that are the "least restrictive" possible.
- Transparency and Feedback: Agencies must provide potential offerors with all qualification requirements upon request and promptly notify them of whether they passed or failed, including specific reasons for any failure.
- Opportunity to Qualify: Offerors must be given a prompt opportunity to demonstrate their qualifications at their own expense (subject to specific small business considerations) using agency-approved facilities or third-party services.
- Non-Exclusion: A Contracting Officer cannot deny an offeror the chance to submit a proposal solely because they are not yet on a Qualified Products List (QPL), Qualified Manufacturers List (QML), or Qualified Bidders List (QBL), provided the offeror can prove they meet the standards before the contract award date.
- Waiver Authority: Requirements for specifying standards and providing testing opportunities can be waived for up to two years if it is determined unreasonable to specify those standards, though this does not apply to existing QPLs, QMLs, or QBLs.
- 7-Year Revalidation: To prevent qualification requirements from becoming obsolete or unnecessarily restrictive, they must be examined and revalidated every seven years.
- No Award Delay: Contracting Officers are not required to delay a procurement to allow a potential offeror time to demonstrate their ability to meet qualification standards.
Practical Implications
- Barriers to Entry: While qualification requirements ensure technical competence, they place a financial and temporal burden on contractors who must fund their own testing and evaluation to get on "approved" lists.
- Pre-Award Strategy: Savvy contractors who are not yet qualified but meet the technical standards can still compete for a contract if they can demonstrate compliance before the award date, preventing agencies from using "the list" as a tool to unfairly restrict the competitive pool.