Attachement 1 Protection of Proprietary Information

PROTECTION OF PROPRIETARY INFORMATION

DURING EVALUATION AND AFTER AWARD

It is the policy of the US Army Ground Vehicle Systems Center (GVSC) to treat all research proposals as privileged information prior to award and to disclose the proposal contents only for evaluation purposes. Technical evaluation of these proposals normally are made by highly qualified scientists from the Government and leading scientists and other preeminent experts outside the Government to ascertain their merits. If you wish, you may restrict the evaluation of your proposal to only scientists within the Government. To do so may prevent it from receiving an evaluation by those most qualified to evaluate it. Therefore, we ask permission to send your proposal outside the Government, if necessary, to obtain an unrestricted evaluation.
All reviewers are made aware that proposals sent to them for evaluation shall not be duplicated, used, or disclosed in whole or in part for any other purpose without the written permission of the offeror.
You should be aware that despite all precautions, we can protect the confidentiality of proprietary information contained in proposals only to the extent that it is exempt from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA; 5 U.S.C. 552). Generally, Exemption 4 of the FOIA [5 U.S.C. 552(b)(4)] will protect from release information submitted to the Government that constitutes either (1) a trade secret or (2) commercial or financial information which is privileged or confidential. Any such proprietary information contained in your proposal should be marked in accordance with FAR 15.608.
Please complete the following statement indicating your proposal treatment preference during the evaluation phase and, should a contract be awarded, afterwards.

STATEMENT OF DISCLOSURE PREFERENCE

in submitting proposal titled

(Organization)

with

(Name) as Principal Investigator
requires the following procedure be used during its evaluation:

() Permission is hereby granted to the GVSC to evaluate this proposal in accordance with its normal procedures which may include evaluation by reviewers both within and outside the Government. Written agreement not to disclose the information contained therein shall be obtained from any nongovernment evaluators. Permission to release outside the Government, for evaluation purposes only, those pages of the proposal marked in accordance with FAR 15.608 is hereby granted, except for the following pages or sections:

() Restrict the evaluation of the above proposal to Government reviewers only.