DISMISSED FOR LACK OF JURISDICTION: April 7, 2015
CBCA 4518, 4519
UNITED SYSTEMS OF ARKANSAS, INC.,
Appellant,
v.
DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES,
Respondent.
Joel F. Hoover and Ashlea Brown of Hewland & Associates, PLLC, of Little Rock,
AR, counsel for Appellant.
The case caption as the decision prints it. Every word is kept; the rule the Board draws around it is not text, so it is not repeated here.
Jeffri Pierre, Office of General Counsel, Department of Health and Human Services, Baltimore, MD, and Richard Bergeron, Office of General Counsel, Department of Health and Human Services, Washington, DC, counsel for Respondent.
Daniel P. Graham and Christine Reynolds of Wiley Rein LLP, Washington, DC, counsel for Group Health Inc. (interested third party).
Before Board Judges DANIELS (Chairman), VERGILIO, and GOODMAN.
VERGILIO, Board Judge.
United Systems of Arkansas, Inc. (subcontractor, not a party to the underlying contract), filed appeals at the Board each concerning a contracting officer’s decision which asserted a claim directly against the subcontractor under a contract between the Department of Health and Human Services (agency) and Group Health Inc. (contractor). A motion and cross-motion from the subcontractor and agency, respectively, ask the Board to dismiss for lack of jurisdiction. The parties recognize the statutory requirements for Board jurisdiction. The contractor has not brought or sponsored the appeals and the contracting officer did not issue a decision directly to the contractor. 41 U.S.C. §§ 7101(7), 7103(a)(3), 7104 (2012). Because a decision by the Government against the contractor is lacking, as is a claim by the contractor against the Government, the Board lacks jurisdiction to address or resolve the apparent dispute between the agency and subcontractor.
Accordingly, the Board does not reach the merits of the appeals; instead, the appeals are DISMISSED FOR LACK OF JURISDICTION.
____________________________
JOSEPH A. VERGILIO
Board Judge
We concur:
STEPHEN M. DANIELS
Board Judge
ALLAN H. GOODMAN
Board Judge
This is a verbatim capture of the text layer of the Board's own document in United Systems of Arkansas, Inc., CBCA 4518, 4519. Nothing is summarized or reworded, and the sections run in the order the Board wrote them. What the page shows and the text does not repeat is the pagination furniture: the page numbers and the rules the Board draws around its caption and under its signatures. The signatures are set back into the columns the Board prints them in, each judge under the name he or she signed, and the typed copy of that name the page carries beneath each signature is not repeated.