Global consulting firm claimed Tandem Motion failed state's minimum experience rule

When the Dunleavy administration published a request on Friday July 24 for proposals to outsource some personnel management tasks, it included a demand that the winning contractor have four years experience.

There was no room for argument or doubt: “Four years of experience in workforce management, performance management, or organizational design and development activities,” the state Department of Administration said in the RFP.

Tandem Motion, the company that received the six-month deal with a $4.5 million offer, was founded a year-and-a-half ago. It did not meet that minimum requirement and should not have been awarded the contract.

Administration Commissioner Kelly Tshibaka helped steer the $4.5 million contract to Tandem Motion by writing a July 27 letter of praise for the small Seattle company owned by Cara and Kurt Griffith.

The contract is paid for with federal COVID-19 relief money. Tshibaka had asked for $11.4 million to be spent in 18 weeks, a request outlined in this memo before the state published the RFP. Health Commissioner Adam Crum signed off on it.

Four state officials who work for Tshibaka in the administration department also wrote glowing missives on state letterhead to help the company. Those five letters, plus a sixth from Environmental Conservation Commissioner Jason Brune, left no doubt that the Dunleavy administration wanted Tandem Motion to get the contract.

Deputy Commissioner of Administration Amanda Holland, project director for the Tandem Motion contract, was the state official who signed the contract on Aug 14. Two weeks earlier, Holland said she was “pleased to recommend Tandem Motion and Cara Griffith.”

The state allowed companies only 7.5 working days to respond to the RFP, an unreasonably short period of time. It allowed 1 working day to evaluate the submissions and announced an intent to award the contract to Tandem Motion on Aug. 7.

That started what should have been a 10-day period for bid protests, but the state signed the deal Aug 14, before the required time.

The failure to meet the state’s four-year standard was obvious to the other company that submitted a responsive proposal under the state’s severely shortened timeline.

On Aug. 15, Guidehouse, a company with 8,000 employees worldwide, protested the Department of Administration decision to award the contract to Tandem Motion, saying the state violated the terms of the RFP.

“Because Tandem Motion is a tiny company with very few employees just a little over one year old, it could not meet these minimum requirements for offerors in the RFP. As a result, DOA should have deemed Tandem Motion’s proposal non-responsive and rejected it. For this reason, Guidehouse requests that you sustain this protest, disqualify Tandem Motion, and make a new award decision,” wrote Shamir Patel, deputy general counsel of Guidehouse.

“It is Guidehouse’s understanding that Tandem Motion has very few regular employees. And while Tandem Motion’s website touts its experience in the private sector (and only mentions one employee, Cara Griffith), there is no evidence it has performed any projects as a prime contractor for any local, state, or federal government entity,” Patel said.

When I wrote here last year that six-month-old Tandem Motion was a state contractor on a project, Tshibaka said I was wrong and that the company was a subcontractor.

In its offer to the state, Tandem Motion said it led the work last fall. In this document from February, Tshibaka’s department said Tandem Motion “assisted” with the project.

“Tandem Motion could not have met the RFP requirement on its own, and the RFP did not permit it to rely on subcontractor experience,” Guidehouse said.

“Moreover, Tandem Motion could not rely on the past employment history of its proposed staff unless it represented that its staff’s past employers will be supporting their performance of this contract,” Patel said.

“Given Tandem Motion’s age and size, it is impossible that it met these requirements. The only explanation is that DOA unfairly or unknowingly relaxed or waived the minimum experience requirements for Tandem Motion by allowing Tandem Motion to ascribe to itself (1) past performance by another company, such as a subcontractor, or (2) the past experience that one of Tandem Motion’s very few employees gained when working with another company, rather than the offeror itself,” Patel said.

He asked that the state rescind the offer to Tandem Motion and “conduct a proper source selection.”

But the state refused to do that. Instead, it modified the experience requirements on Aug. 17, claiming that having one management employee with at least four years experience would be deemed acceptable.

This was three days after the contract had been signed by the state.

Guidehouse said the state change required an amended RFP. In addition, the company said the state was improperly relaxing the experience requirement in the RFP “to allow Tandem to claim the experience of another entity simply because one of its current employees used to work at that entity. In short, you are now considering awarding a critically important contract for pandemic preparation and planning to a company based on the experience one employee at that company had while working at another company—this is wholly unreasonable.”

Guidehouse said it protested “the terms of this apparent solicitation modification as unfair, arbitrary, disparate treatment solely meant to allow Tandem to claim experience it clearly does not have and retain an award that should have already been made to Guidehouse under the express terms of the RFP.”

On Aug. 28, the deputy chief procurement officer in Tshibaka’s department, Linda Polk, said that she couldn’t tell from this corporate history offered by Guidehouse, a corporate giant with a long track record, if it met the 4-year requirement, a laughable claim.

Regarding one-year-old Tandem Motion and its employee, the deputy chief in procurement said, “Cara Griffith met the minimum four year requirement,” because of work she did before the company was created, starting in 2013.

Polk said if any part of the RFP was unclear to Guidehouse, the company “should have submitted questions to the procurement officer of record prior to the close of the RFP.”

Nothing was unclear about this to Guidehouse. The RFP was clear in requiring a company with four years experience, but the state went in after the fact to change the rule, claiming it was not a real change.

After the state’s rejection of its protest, Guidehouse did not take the matter any further, it appears.

Tshibaka wrote on Facebook that the “process followed procurement rules, and a contract protest found in favor of DOA.”

The RFP did not say that a single management employee had to have at least four years experience to qualify for a contract potentially worth up to $16 million with renewals. It said that the “offeror” had to have four years experience.

As the “offeror,” Tandem Motion did not meet the RFP requirements. The protest should have been upheld, but the Department of Administration made sure that Tandem Motion got the contract.

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