The SSA has broad discretion in acquisitions where the evaluation factors are listed in descending order of importance. The trade-off between price and technical factors made by the selection official must still be supported by the established evaluation factors. An explicit justification is required to support award to a higher priced, higher quality technical proposal, even where technical is the more important factor. Selection officials also have broad discretion in assessing the significance of a technical point differential or price differential. For this reason the SSA must be presented with sufficient information on each of the competing offerors and their proposals in order to make a comparative analysis and arrive at a rational, fully supportable selection decision.
Narrative statements serve as the most important part of the documentation supporting the decision.
The selection decision shall show the relative differences among proposals and their strengths, weaknesses and risks in terms of the evaluation factors. Each of these is an essential part of providing adequate support for the ultimate selection decision. Such documentation need not be lengthy, as long as it effectively conveys the basis for the evaluator's assessment. The preparation of these narrative statements provides an excellent discipline for the evaluators because it forces them to justify their ratings.