"postal service contract"

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Contractors are entitled to recover consultant and attorney costs reasonably incurred in preparing, pricing, and negotiating a change order under federal government contracts, including U.S. Postal Service contracts. That’s the holding in Tip Top Constr., Inc. v. Donahoe, 695 F.3d 1276 (Fed. Cir. 2012). The court overturned a Postal Service Board of Contract Appeals decision that had erroneously limited the contractor’s recovery of these costs. End result: if an agency changes your contract (whether by unilateral direction or constructive change), your request for an equitable price adjustment may include reasonable consultant and attorney costs.

Postal Service contractors frequently employ their own language.  For example, to a postal contractor, a “highway contract” is not a contract to build a road but rather a contract to transport mail on a road. A new example of this postal-only language is something called a “disagreement.”  This is the word used to describe what the rest of the government contract world would call a “protest.”  The Postal Service’s internal bid protest (“disagreement”) procedures have been around now for several years, but have recently been revised, so this would be a good time to review them. 

Is a contractor entitled to be paid for performing additional work if that work can be accomplished within the contract’s delivery schedule?  The answer is a resounding yes.  There is no such thing as non-compensable “extra time” under a Postal Service HCR contract.  While some officials may believe a contractor is not entitled to additional pay for service changes that do not extend the delivery schedule, this is a dangerous misunderstanding of HCR contracts, as established by a recent case decided by the U.S. Court of Federal Claims.