Compare and Contrast an Agency Protest to a General Accounting Office Research Paper - 1

Compare and Contrast an Agency Protest to a General Accounting Office (GAO) protest - Research Paper Example This include establishment of mechanisms through which offerors can question the officials in charge of the procurement procedures in the government departments. In case the procuring agencies are not compliant with the law and regulations governing the procurement process, the aggrieved parties undertake the bid protest. The major forms of federal bid protest include an agency-level protest, protest through the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the jurisdiction through United States Court of Federal Claims (COFC) (GAO-03-673G Government Auditing Standards, 2012). This paper seeks to compare and contrast an Agency Protest to a General Accounting Office (GAO) Protest. Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR) 33.103 gives the guidelines that must be followed by the agencies during addressing of the protests generated by the offerors. Having being established by the Executive Order 12979, agency protest stipulates that all the concerned parties must take all the necessary steps to ensure that the conflict is solved in an amicable way. Even though the government has clearly outlined the regulations that control the agency protests, most of the agencies complement the FAR provisions by initiating their own regulations that are not favorable to the offerors. A protest is initiated by an interested party. An interested party is the individual whose economic interest would be adversely affected by the failure to win a contract or through the award of the contact (Robert, 2012). This is one of the major aspects that are common both to agency and GAO protests. There is no jurisdiction on the protests that an agency can handle, since it has the authority to d eal with all the protests that are related to its contracts. However, according to Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act, a protest that is related to delivery order contracts or issuance of task that can be given to various