I was engaged in a saturation dive into the e-portal last week and missed this story and the Twitter storm which followed. Alongside this the other current bane of my life, verification of these stupid and entirely unhelpful new supervisor forms continues as new contracts look further away than ever.
I doubt this single error will derail the whole process. It is unlikely to be the only one however and as we have said before was utterly predictable. These type of procurement exercises at least make a scintilla of sense in the context of last weeks bid for small numbers of phone advice contracts, they make none on such a large scale basis.
And now a displaced firm who may have made significant investment in preparation for this offer of contract will face the prospect of launching its own legal challenge – perhaps their result was subject to a “basic transcription error” too.
The LAA’s ludicrous micromanagement of contracts, which brooks not a single error in a firm’s stewardship of taxpayer’s money, does not seem applied with the same gimlet-eyed focus on its own work.
In the same vein one also wonders what instructions the hardworking taxpayer would provide regarding the cost risk involved in the current litigation?
