The last week saw GAO sustain two protests that should put the nail in the SAM “continuous registration” coffin.

The Federal Acquisition Regulatory (“FAR”) Council recently revised the standard System for Award Management (“SAM”) registration clause (FAR 52.204-7) to make clear there is no “continuous registration requirement”—contractors need to be registered in SAM only at the time they submit their final, legally-binding proposal.

In two recent decisions, GAO has confirmed that the same was (and is) true under the prior version of FAR 52.204-7 as well. That is, if an agency allows an offeror to submit a revised proposal, and the offeror is properly registered in SAM when that final proposal is submitted, it does not matter if there was some SAM registration failure at an earlier stage of the procurement. The offeror is eligible, and it would be unreasonable for an agency to eliminate an offeror or terminate an award based on a pre-FPR SAM flaw.

In UNICA-BPA JV, LLC, B-422580.3, the protester (“UNICA”) had an active SAM registration when it submitted its final revised proposal, but the Agency later eliminated UNICA from the competition based on the fact that UNICA was not registered in SAM at the time of its initial proposal. That was unreasonable, GAO found, because UNICA had in fact met the stated requirement to be registered in SAM “when submitting an offer,” as the FAR defines “offer” as a proposal that can form a binding contract, and that definition applied only to UNICA’s final, legally-binding proposal, which was compliant. GAO thus found the Agency acted unreasonably by eliminating UNICA from the competition and sustained UNICA’s protest.

In Metris LLC, B-422996.2, the Agency proposed to take corrective action to terminate the award to Metris for having a break in its SAM registration between the time of the initial proposal submission and its final proposal submission. GAO found that Metris’s initial proposal was extinguished when Metris submitted – and the Agency accepted – Metris’s final proposal revision. Because Metris was registered in SAM at the time of the final proposal revision, Metris had an active SAM registration when it submitted its offer, in accordance with FAR 52.204-7. GAO thus recommended that the agency abandon its plans to terminate Metris’s contract award, and instead “maintain its existing award to Metris.”

These cases follow the legal reasoning of Hanford Tank Disposition Alliance, LLC v. United States, 173 Fed. Cl. 269, 312-319 (2024), and should deter agencies from eliminating any more offerors over pre-FPR SAM issues.