Each year billions of dollars in contracts are awarded by the U.S. federal government using competitive source selection procedures. The GAO continues to find violations of federal procurement statutes and regulations in source selection procedures resulting in sustained award protests. Sustained bid protests delay contract award, impose significant costs for protest corrective actions, cause performance delays for agency operations, and shrink the public's confidence in the government's ability to make correct contract award decisions based on properly performed source selection evaluations. The purpose of this qualitative multiple case study was to contribute to agency theory by studying errors in source selection events that result in sustained decisions. This study evaluated how the agent's actions during the source selection process created the conditions that resulted in noncompliance with the principal's governing regulations and statues. The study considered 56 GAO sustained decisions during fiscal year 2016 representing 23 Department of Defense agencies.

The results from the first research question identified specific conditions and themes including new themes. The specific details illustrate the mistakes made and could benefit future evaluations and training purposes. The results from the second question identified several themes of agents' noncompliant decisions and actions with some crossing over the source selection process. These themes may have great implications by viewing sequentially and related to decisions and action not just as individual noncompliant actions. The results from the last question identified three major themes, the failure to follow statutes and regulations as well as the new theme of not meeting case precedent in many protests. The GAO's use of case precedents infers mandatory compliance with a missing body of knowledge. The results framed the agents' actions and decisions that highlighted new themes that may be used by academics and practitioners to achieve better understand the challenges of the source selection process. The importance of case precedence along with the GAO's standards and guidance, combined with the statutory and regulatory guidance, could be used by policy makers as well as academics and practitioners to reduce errors and sustained protests.