Okay, but who determines the quality issues? The government could easily fall into the same issue that some of our clients do. Yes, that competitor provided yo

Okay, but who determines the quality issues? The government could easily fall into the same issue that some of our clients do. Yes, that competitor provided you a solution for 10% less, however it's horribly bloated and inefficient and will have double the on-going hardware costs, and the solution itself is a fucking mess that is going to increase the cost of any changes or maintenance ten-fold. Problem is, they don't know the difference. The people who will best know the difference are going to be the people who work with/in the same area - the supplier's competitors. Far from impartial. So maybe we set up some sort of oversight agency, but then we either have them make snap judgements without the appropriate understanding and penalizing what may be more difficult/complicated projects (meaning no one will want to bid on them), or we create such a huge overhead in documentation that we're pretty much back where we are now - no one but the largest of players can even afford the overhead to participate.