When applying for a GSA Multiple Award Schedule (MAS) contract, offerors generally must rely on their own corporate experience to demonstrate capability. But what if your business has subsidiaries with their own contract experience? Is the experience of your subsidiaries considered your business’s past experience in the MAS Solicitation? And what about Joint Ventures (JVs) that your business may be involved in – is that experience usable in a MAS offer proposal?
Businesses organize work and contract assignments in different ways, often involving outside or affiliate entities that contribute via subcontracting, Contractor Teaming Arrangements (CTAs), or other methods. Sometimes it can be difficult for a business to determine what past performance they can claim as part of a MAS offer. This article is aimed at untangling the rules surrounding past performance eligibility in the MAS Solicitation.
Can You Use Parent, Subsidiary, or Affiliate Experience on a MAS Offer?
Generally not. Corporate affiliation alone is not enough to substantiate that the work can be attributed to the applicant. While there are some exceptions for eligible offerors, a standard MAS application does not allow for experience to be used that is not directly associated with the legal entity applying for the Schedule. We’ll dive into the exceptions later on in this article once we establish what past performance requirements look like in a GSA MAS offer.
What is Included in Past Performance Requirements?
Providing specific demonstration of past performance is an integral component of the Technical Proposal section in the overall MAS offer. For businesses with existing Schedule contracts, expanding into additional services Special Item Numbers (SINs) also requires demonstration of past performance in the relevant field.
Past performance is evaluated in two ways for MAS offer proposal: customer references and technical narratives. With limited exceptions addressed later, the references and project experience submitted should be associated with the legal entity applying for the Schedule contract.
What Are Customer References in an MAS Offer?
Customer references are applicable to all offers and require customer review of three distinct contracts. GSA prefers Contractor Performance Assessment Reports, or CPARs, as references. However, some offerors may not have three relevant and recent CPARs available. In this case, GSA allows for the substitution of Past Performance Questionnaires (PPQs). The template for these is maintained on GSA’s website.
What Are Technical Narratives in an MAS Offer?
The second evaluation method GSA employs is the use of technical narratives. A technical narrative consists of information on a relevant project, ongoing or recently completed, that demonstrates services performed in alignment with the scope of the SIN applied for. This narrative must be validated with the executed contract award document and Statement of Work (SOW).
How Does the Government Define an “Applying Entity” in the MAS Program?
The government identifies MAS applicants as individual legal entities according to their Unique Entity Identifier (UEI). UEIs are obtained and managed through the System for Award Management (SAM) official government website, also known as SAM.gov. Any business or non-profit that wants to compete for federal prime awards must have this registration.
UEIs do not cover multiple legal entities. For example, a parent company’s UEI cannot be used by any subsidiary, and vice versa. Specific types of teaming arrangements that involve a creation of a new entity, namely a Joint Venture (JV) agreement, will need to register for its own UEI; it cannot use the UEI of either partner corporation.
When GSA awards an MAS contract, the contract is associated with only one UEI. A Multiple Award Schedule contract cannot be transferred to another UEI.
How Are Subsidiaries Defined in the MAS Solicitation?
The MAS Solicitation does not expressly permit a subsidiary (defined as an entity in which more than 50 percent of the entity is owned directly by a parent corporation or through another subsidiary of a parent corporation), to use the experience of a parent corporation in its MAS application. The same is true for sister corporations, entities owned by the same parent corporation or holding company.
Moreover, GSA does not explicitly support parent companies using the experience of subsidiaries if the work is not directly associated with the parent company. For standard MAS offers, past performance is expected to be associated with the legal entity that performed the work; ownership structure alone does not justify claiming non-associated experience.
Some government contracting vehicles, such as OASIS+, contain express provisions on how the government will consider affiliate experience when the offeror can demonstrate a meaningful relationship between the entities.
Does Experience From A Joint Venture Count for A Partner Member?
The MAS Solicitation contains several clauses recognizing the experience of JV partners. Because of this, experience obtained through a Joint Venture effort is generally much easier to justify than experience belonging solely to a parent, subsidiary, or sister company. If a company elects to use work done as part of a JV in its application, they should clearly identify what portion of the work was performed by their company as part of the JV in the corresponding technical narratives.
Additionally, the MAS Solicitation expressly permits a JV offeror to rely on the past performance and project experience of its JV partners when evaluating past performance.
What is the Exception to Allowing Subsidiary and Affiliate Past Performance in a GSA MAS Offer?
There is one exception to the rules we discussed above, and that is for entities submitting a MAS application that have less than 2 years of corporate experience with the Startup Springboard and FASt Lane Programs.
FASt Lane Program and Startup Springboard
Typically, an offeror must have more than 2 years of experience to apply for a MAS contract, but some companies can waive this requirement if they qualify for FASt Lane, a program that grants expedited processing times to contract proposals that directly support federal agency requirements.
The changes to the application requirements for these newer entities, referred to as Startup Springboard by GSA, includes allowing the offeror to use work performed by affiliates, predecessor companies, or key personnel in the provision of customer references and technical narratives. If the offeror does use affiliate experience in either of these evaluation factors, they must identify how the entity or key personnel will be meaningfully involved in performing the MAS contract.
Currently, FASt Lane is only open to offerors submitting under the IT Large Category. However, this is expected to change with the upcoming release of Solicitation Refresh #33, which will expand FASt Lane to the entire MAS Program (for offers only).
Do You Have a Strategy for Your Technical Proposal?
If you want help determining what past project experience to use in your technical proposal, how to select the right SIN for the opportunities you’re targeting on Schedule, or how to avoid pitfalls that might get your application rejected (like using affiliate project experience), Winvale’s team of expert consultants and proposal writers can help. Reach out today!
