Interwest Construction v. Jesse Brown, Secretary of Veterans Affairs

I respectfully dissent. It is inequitable to require the contractor to pay for the VA’s after-the-fact reading of the specification, when the specification was, in retrospect, ambiguous, when the ambiguity was latent, and the contractor’s reading was reasonable. The government now has the benefit of a chiller that is $72,000 more expensive than the chiller that was bid, at the expense of the contractor who was free of fault. I would remand for a fair allocation of the burdens flowing from the government’s less-than-perfect specification.

A

This is not a case of a contractor cutting corners by…