TL;DR. An organizational conflict of interest means your other work could bias you or give you an unfair edge. Picture a referee who owns a team: even a fair game looks rigged.
- New to this? Unequal access is what you know, biased ground rules is what you wrote, impaired objectivity is what you would judge.
- Running capture? Screen for OCI at the pWin gate, before spending capture money. Track what your contracts bar you from (see Section H).
- Think you can mitigate? Propose firewalls or recusals early, in writing. Never plan on a waiver.
- Heard the rules changed? FAR 9.5 still governs. The rewrite is only proposed.
The phone call nobody wants
Here is a scene that plays out more often than it should. Your team has been tracking an opportunity for eight months. You went to the industry day. You wrote the white paper. You built the team, lined up the subs, and put real money into the capture. Then the RFP drops, and somewhere in Section H there is a paragraph explaining that any contractor who supported the requirements definition effort is ineligible to compete.
You supported the requirements definition effort. That was the whole reason you knew about this opportunity so early.
That is an organizational conflict of interest, and the frustrating part is that you did not do anything wrong. You did good work on a previous contract. The problem is that the good work put you on the wrong side of a line, and nobody drew the line where you could see it.
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What an OCI actually is
Strip out the legal language and the idea is simple. The government does not want you in a position where your other work either biases your judgment or hands you an unfair head start. Think of a referee who also happens to own one of the teams. Maybe he calls a perfectly fair game. Nobody watching will ever believe it, and that is enough of a problem on its own.
Today this lives in FAR subpart 9.5, and it puts the job on the contracting officer, not on you. The CO is supposed to spot potential conflicts as early as possible and then avoid, neutralize, or mitigate the significant ones before award. Two ideas sit underneath all of it: stop conflicting roles from biasing a contractor's judgment, and stop anyone from getting an unfair competitive advantage.
So what? The decision is not yours, which cuts both ways. You cannot self-certify your way out of a real conflict. But you also cannot be disqualified on a hunch, and a CO who has not done the analysis is a CO you can have a conversation with.
The three flavors, and which one will actually get you
Unequal access to information is the mildest. You hold nonpublic information, maybe a competitor's cost data you saw while performing another contract, and that would give you an edge. This one is usually fixable. Firewall the people who saw it, document the barrier, move on.
Biased ground rules is the one from the opening scene. You helped shape the requirement, so you would be competing on a playing field you helped build. This one is hard to fix because there is nothing to firewall. The knowledge is in the requirement itself.
Impaired objectivity is the one that catches people, because it does not feel like a conflict until someone says it out loud. You would be in a position to evaluate, assess, or advise on your own work, or on a competitor's. A support contractor asked to review system performance for a system its own division builds is not being accused of anything. The structure is just wrong, and structure is harder to fix than staffing.
The pattern worth memorizing: unequal access is about what you know, biased ground rules is about what you wrote, and impaired objectivity is about what you would be judging. If you can sort a pursuit into one of those three buckets before you spend capture money, you are already ahead of most of your competitors.
What changes if the rewrite ever lands
Congress told the FAR Council to modernize all of this back in 2022, and in January 2025 a proposed rule showed up that would move OCI out of FAR 9.5 and into a new subpart 3.12. The comment window closed in March 2025. As of today it is still a proposed rule. The separate effort to overhaul the FAR touched Part 3 in June 2026 and did not finalize the OCI piece either.
So FAR 9.5 is still the operative rule, and anyone telling you the new framework applies today is ahead of the regulation. Worth knowing what it would do, though. It shifts work onto contractors.
The proposed version names the same three categories explicitly and expects you to disclose more up front: existing limits on your future contracting, financial interests that could create a conflict, professional standards that keep you clean, what you intend to do about any of it, and whether you had access to competitive information others did not.
So what? The direction of travel is toward you doing the identifying rather than waiting for a CO to do it. Companies that already track their own conflicts as a normal part of pipeline management will barely notice. Everyone else is going to feel it.
What to actually do about it
- Screen for OCI at the same gate where you screen for pWin. The right time to find a conflict is at qualification, before the capture budget is committed. The wrong time is the week the RFP drops.
- Keep a living list of what your other contracts restrict. If you cannot answer "what work are we currently barred from pursuing" in under a minute, that is the gap. The restrictions are written into your existing contracts, usually in Section H.
- Read the OCI provision before you read the SOW. A solicitation carrying a real conflict should tell you the nature of it and what restraints come with it. That paragraph decides whether the rest of the document matters to you.
- If you think you can mitigate, propose it early and in writing. A mitigation plan the CO sees for the first time in your proposal is a plan with no time left to negotiate. Firewalls, recusals, and bringing in a sub to do the conflicted piece are all real options, but only if someone can evaluate them before award.
- Do not count on a waiver. They exist, they require a written request, and they get approved at a level well above your contracting officer. Treat one as a lucky outcome, never as the plan.
Module: Capture Management & Business Development
This post touches on concepts covered in depth in the Capture Management & Business Development module. BD lifecycle, proposal writing, win strategy, and the source selection process from both sides.
Start This Module Free →Where we cover this in the lessons
OCI shows up in two places on the platform, and they answer different questions.
In the Defense Contracting Fundamentals module, the Section H: Special Requirements lesson covers it where you will actually encounter it, in the part of the contract that sets your restrictions on future work, alongside the other Section H terms that quietly run your program.
In The Compliance Stack module, OCI Meets Personal Ethics takes the advanced cut: how an organizational conflict and an individual's own ethics obligations overlap, and why a mitigation plan solves the first without touching the second.
If you only read one, read the Section H lesson. Most people meet their OCI restrictions after they have signed, which is exactly the wrong order.
The Three Kinds of OCI
| Type | What Happened | Example | Can It Be Mitigated? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Biased ground rules | You helped write the requirement | You wrote the SOW, now you want to bid it | Rarely, usually you are out |
| Impaired objectivity | You would be evaluating your own work | Advising the government on a system you build | Sometimes, with firewalls or a subcontractor |
| Unequal access to information | You hold nonpublic data competitors do not | Another contract gave you their cost data | Often, with a firewall and non-disclosure |