On being asked to revise our costings twice

A question that keeps arriving: were the two requests to revise our costings a sign that something was wrong with the numbers?

No. Being sent away to sharpen an estimate is the ordinary condition of this work. The first request, in July, asked us to carry US labor rates rather than the international comparables we had used, which was correct and which we should have done unprompted. Our number went up by about eleven percent and we were glad of the correction.

The second request came in September. I have been through both letters more times than is useful, because the second is the same letter. Not similar. The same four items in the same order, with the same two clarifying sentences, sent seven weeks after we had answered all of them.

The likeliest explanation is a filing error, and I want to say plainly that this is what I think happened. A working group handling four alternatives across two agencies will duplicate a letter now and again. We answered it again, at greater length, and heard nothing further.

What I have not been able to work out is why the September letter references an enclosure that was not enclosed, and that does not appear in our July reply either. I have written to ask what it was. I expect the answer is that there wasn’t one.