Is Your Bidding Process Fair and Transparent?

A bidding process is fair and transparent when any qualified vendor could have found the opportunity, understood how it would be judged, submitted without an unnecessary barrier, and afterwards been told why they lost. Each of those four is a specific, checkable practice - and the reason to get them right is not only ethics. A process that cannot be explained after the fact is the one that draws complaints, audits and protests, even when the decision itself was sound.

What Happened in Orem, Utah?

In 2022, the city of Orem, Utah selected a newly formed firm with no prior feasibility-study experience to study splitting a local school district. Residents complained to the Utah State Auditor's Office. The auditor's May 2022 letter found the procurement fell within the city's own ordinance - specifically a provision allowing exceptions to bidding requirements - and so broke no rules. But the letter did not stop there. It encouraged government entities "to utilize a competitive procurement process to the greatest extent possible, even when not required by code, ordinance, or policy, in order to provide taxpayers with a competitive and transparent process." That distinction is the whole lesson: the process was legal because an exception applied, and the auditor still recommended competing it anyway.

Salt Lake City television station 2KUTV asked The Bid Lab to review Orem's process as an outside expert for its Crisis in the Classroom coverage. Jordan Harary, Co-Founder and President of The Bid Lab, found the opportunity had been advertised too narrowly, that proposals had to be hand-delivered in person - "which in my years doing RFPs, in the hundreds if not thousands that we've submitted, I've never seen" - and that the solicitation had no scoring sheet at all, so we built one ourselves to compare the bids. Scored that way, the more experienced bidder came out substantially ahead. You can read the full coverage of our audit.

What Makes a Bidding Process Defensible?

None of the practices below are exotic - they are what a well-run agency already does, and close to what school districts follow when they score bids. What makes them matter is that each one leaves evidence behind.

Where Are You Actually Required to Advertise?

Wherever your governing code says, which is usually more specific than people expect and is the floor rather than the ceiling. New York State, for example, requires most agency procurements of $50,000 or more to be advertised in the New York State Contract Reporter. Other states designate a central procurement portal, a newspaper of record, or both, with prescribed notice periods. Start by finding your own rule and meeting it exactly - a technical advertising failure can invalidate an award on its own. Then ask the separate question of whether the legal minimum will actually reach qualified vendors. If your required posting is a portal that few firms in your category monitor, adding your own website, a trade association list or a bid-notification service is cheap and widens the field. The goal is a real pool of qualified bidders, not the largest possible number of postings.

Why Does the Submission Method Matter So Much?

Because requiring in-person delivery filters your field on something that has nothing to do with vendor quality. It excludes every capable firm outside driving distance, favors those already familiar with where to go and whom to hand the envelope to, and creates exactly the kind of private, undocumented contact that makes an award look arranged - which is what made it the most striking finding in the Orem review. Accept electronic submission through a portal or a monitored address, with an automatic timestamped receipt so there is no argument about what arrived when. Where a physical copy is genuinely necessary, publish a mailing address and accept carrier delivery so a vendor two states away can still comply.

What If an Exception Lets You Skip Competition?

Then you have a choice to make rather than a decision that is already made. Genuine emergencies, sole-source situations and small purchases below a threshold exist for good reasons, and using them properly is not a scandal. But an exception answers whether you may skip competition, not whether you should. Before invoking one, ask whether you could explain the choice to a reporter, a council member or an auditor without discomfort - and whether the sole source is genuinely sole, or just the vendor you already know. Where an exception is justified, document the justification at the time. A contemporaneous memo explaining why competition was impractical is worth a great deal more than a reconstruction written after someone complains.

How Do You Keep the Evaluation Itself Clean?

Score against published criteria, in writing, with more than one evaluator, and collect conflict-of-interest disclosures from the panel before bids are opened rather than after. Our guide to the RFP evaluation process covers the mechanics; the fairness dimension is mostly about the record. If the only artifact your process leaves behind is a signed contract, you have no way to demonstrate the decision was sound. If it leaves a scoring sheet with per-factor justifications, a documented reconciliation and debrief notes, most complaints resolve before they become anything else - and the ones that proceed to a formal protest are far more survivable.

See How Others Publish Theirs

Comparing your notice against live solicitations from similar organizations is a quick check on whether yours is findable. Search open bids on Bid Banana.