Professional Service Procurement – Simultaneously Serving as a Prime and a Subconsultant

by Kevin McGhee, VTCA; Elizabeth Quinn, Quinn Consulting Services, LLC; Jena Richmond, VDOT - Professional Services Procurement Office

A conversation that started at the June 6 ECLC meeting ultimately delivered some clarification that may be valuable to the general consulting engineering community.  This clarification relates to how teams may form and in what roles they may serve in responding to requests for proposals. Specifically, a firm that is submitting as a Prime Consultant on one team may also serve as a subconsultant on another team. However, this is only allowable as long as no subconsultants on the original Prime Consultant’s team will also serve with them as a subconsultant on another Prime Offerors team.

There is one reference to this in PSPO’s current policy manual in Chapter 3, but the matter is most directly addressed in Bid Express, Section 1 for General Requirements, which states: “In response to this RFP, Offerors submitting an expression of interest (EOI) as a Prime Consultant shall not serve as a sub-consultant on any other team that includes any of the same team member’s firms in which they are the Prime.”

At the end of the day, what this means for consultant firms is that they may serve as a Prime in response to a given RPF (proposal A) while also serving as a sub on other teams (proposals B, C, etc.), but those other teams may not include any common teammates to proposal A.

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact Kevin McGhee.