bid-red-team-dual-review

Bid Red Team Dual Review

Acknowledgement: Shared by Peter Bamuhigire, techguypeter.com, +256 784 464178. Dual-review contract adapted from the Santa Method (origin: Ronald Skelton, Founder, RapportScore.ai), read from the ECC skill engine's skills/santa-method/SKILL.md, and scoped to this engine's tender/EOI/compliance context.

Use When

A bid, tender response, EOI, or proposal section will be submitted to a buyer, evaluator, donor, or regulator and a single self-review is not enough assurance for the stakes involved (large value, regulated sector, legal/financial commitments, reputational exposure).
The routine ai-slop-audit per-section gate has passed but the content still carries compliance, legal, financial, or outcome-guarantee risk that a style/slop audit does not test.
kaizen-improvement-system step 6 ("run one time-boxed evaluator simulation or compliance red-team") calls for a red-team pass and the stakes justify two independent reviewers instead of one.
Content makes claims that, if wrong or unsubstantiated, would trigger a compliance knockout, a legal exposure, or a false outcome guarantee (financial services, health, public-sector, donor-funded, or regulated-industry proposals).

Do Not Use When

The content is an internal draft, exploratory outline, or working note not yet intended for evaluator eyes — use anti-ai-slop as the real-time guardrail instead.
The check is purely mechanical (page limits, price tokens in the technical folder, file naming) — use the relevant submission checklist, e.g. skills/domain-delivery/giz-eu-local-procurement-response/references/submission-pack-checklist.md, or submission-proof-and-receipt-discipline for what-was-sent evidence.
No second reviewer context (a genuinely isolated second pass, human or agent) is available — see Degraded Mode.

Required Inputs

Artefact	Source/provider	Required?	Purpose	If absent
The content under review, in near-final form	Proposal draft	Yes	Fixed target for both reviewers	Stop; nothing to review
The evaluation rubric (base + compliance-sensitive extension, below)	This skill	Yes	Objective pass/fail criteria for both reviewers	Stop; do not improvise criteria mid-review
ToR/RFP mandatory requirements and evaluation criteria	Buyer documents	Yes for compliance checks	Anchors "approved terminology" and "jurisdiction-appropriate language" checks in the actual tender, not a past one	Mark compliance checks `NOT_ASSESSED`, per the never-infer-evaluation-criteria rule in `rules/common/core.md`
Evidence register / claim sources	Proposal working papers	Conditional	Supports the factual-accuracy and hallucination checks	Flag unverifiable claims as findings, do not silently pass them

Workflow

Run the phases in order; stop and recover at any phase whose inputs or verdicts are incomplete.

Phase 1 — Fix the target

Freeze the exact text/version under review. Santa Method is a post-generation verification layer, not a drafting technique — do not revise while reviewers are working.

Phase 2 — Independent dual review

Spawn two reviewers with no shared context:

Neither reviewer sees the other's assessment, prompt, or existence.
Both receive the identical rubric (below) and the identical content under review.
Each reviewer returns a structured verdict per criterion: PASS or FAIL with the specific issue cited — not prose impressions.
Each reviewer's brief is explicitly adversarial: "your job is to find problems, not approve." Rubber-stamping both reviewers defeats the method.

In this engine, run reviewers as separate Agent tool invocations (or, if agents are unavailable, as fully context-reset sequential passes — see Degraded Mode) so isolation is real, not simulated.

Phase 3 — Base rubric

Criterion	Pass condition	Failure signal
Factual accuracy	Every claim verifiable against the evidence register or the ToR/RFP	Invented statistics, wrong dates, misstated buyer requirements
Hallucination-free	No fabricated entities, quotes, credentials, or citations	Attributed quotes with no source, invented reference projects
Completeness	Every ToR/RFP requirement and scored criterion is addressed	Missing sections, skipped mandatory items, unanswered evaluation questions
Internal consistency	No contradictions across technical, financial, and annex content	Methodology promises what the work plan or budget does not support
Compliance (base)	Passes this engine's own gates already run (anti-ai-slop, ai-slop-audit)	Slop-audit grade F content reaching this review unresolved

Phase 4 — Compliance-sensitive rubric extension

Apply this extension whenever the content is regulated, legal, or financial — the default assumption for tender and EOI submissions:

Criterion	Pass condition	Failure signal
No outcome guarantees or unsubstantiated claims	Results are stated as targets, ranges, or evidenced track record — never as guaranteed outcomes	"We will guarantee a 30% cost reduction" with no basis
Required disclaimers present	Every place the ToR/RFP or sector norm requires a disclaimer, qualification, or assumption statement has one	A financial projection with no assumptions stated; a health/safety claim with no scope limit
Approved terminology only	Language matches the buyer's own terms (from the ToR/RFP, evaluation grid, or sector skill) rather than the proposer's marketing vocabulary	Renaming a buyer's defined deliverable, inventing a certification name
Jurisdiction-appropriate language	Legal, tax, licensing, and regulatory statements match the jurisdiction named in the ToR/RFP, sourced per `operational-readiness-and-localisation` and Digital Research, not assumed from another market	A claim correct in one country asserted without qualification in another

Phase 5 — Verdict gate

Both reviewers must return PASS on every criterion for the content to ship. One reviewer catching an issue the other misses means the issue is real — that asymmetry is exactly what independent review exists to surface, not a tie-break to resolve by majority.

Phase 6 — Fix and reconverge

Merge and deduplicate both reviewers' findings.
Fix only the flagged issues — no unrequested rewriting.
Re-run both reviewers as fresh instances with no memory of the previous round, on the same rubric, against the fixed content.
Repeat for a maximum of 3 iterations total.
If round 3 still fails, stop and escalate to the accountable reviewer/signatory named in the relevant pipeline or domain skill — do not ship on a fourth attempt or on partial credit.

Decision Rules

Condition	Action	Failure or risk avoided
Both reviewers PASS all criteria	Ship — record the result as this skill's evidence artefact	An undocumented release decision
Either reviewer FAILs any criterion	Fix and reconverge (Phase 6); never ship on one PASS and one FAIL	Majority voting hiding a material finding
3 iterations exhausted without full PASS	Stop, escalate to a human signatory, do not submit	A fourth attempt turning an unresolved blocker into false assurance
No genuinely isolated second reviewer available	Downgrade to Degraded Mode and label the result accordingly — never present a single-reviewer pass as a dual-review PASS	Context bleed being reported as independent assurance
Compliance-sensitive extension criterion fails	Treat as a knockout-equivalent finding — same severity as a `kaizen-improvement-system` compliance blocker	A legal, financial, or compliance defect being treated as style feedback

Outputs

Artefact	Consumer	Acceptance condition
Dual-review verdict record (both reviewers' structured checks, iteration count, final verdict)	Proposal lead, reviewer, release owner	Shows both reviewers' criteria-by-criteria results and the round they converged on, or the escalation
Findings register (deduplicated, with fix applied per item)	Bid lead	Every FAIL traces to a specific fix or an explicit accepted-risk note from the accountable owner

Evidence Produced

Evidence	Consumer	Acceptance condition
Reviewer A and Reviewer B structured verdicts	Reviewer and release owner	Independently reproducible — a third party could re-run the same rubric against the same content and reach a comparable verdict
Iteration log	Release owner	States round count, what changed each round, and whether convergence or escalation occurred

Capability Contract

Read and search are required. This is a read-only review by default: it may inspect the frozen draft, rubric, ToR/RFP, and evidence register, but may not alter source files, submit a bid, contact a buyer, or certify compliance. Running two independent reviewer agents requires the Agent tool or an equivalent isolated second pass; fixing flagged content requires the same explicit drafting authority as the section being reviewed. Final submission remains gated by kaizen-improvement-system and this engine's own release rules — this skill produces one input to that gate, not a standalone ship decision.

Degraded Mode

If the ToR/RFP, evidence register, frozen draft, or isolated reviewer is unavailable, mark the affected criterion NOT_ASSESSED and report the missing input before any release decision. Without a genuinely isolated second reviewer (no Agent tool, no second human), simulate isolation with an explicit context reset between passes: record Reviewer A's findings verbatim, clear context completely, then run Reviewer B fresh against the same rubric and content with no visibility into Reviewer A's output. Label the result "single-session simulated dual review" rather than a true dual review, qualify the limitation to the release owner, and do not represent it as a dual-review PASS.

Quality Standards

Both reviewers use the same frozen version, rubric, mandatory requirements, and evidence boundary; the verdict record names each input version.
Every criterion has a PASS or FAIL result with a specific cited issue or evidence location; unsupported claims remain findings.
The final record states the iteration count, convergence or escalation, unresolved risks, and whether any criterion is NOT_ASSESSED.
The compliance extension is applied whenever the proposal is regulated, legal, financial, donor-funded, or otherwise compliance-sensitive; no outcome guarantee is accepted without a stated basis.
A reviewer result is reproducible from the retained draft, rubric, and evidence register, while submission authority remains outside this skill.

References

Domain Anti-Patterns

Letting one reviewer see the other's findings before completing their own pass (anchoring bias). Fix: freeze each brief and retain the independent verdict before reconvergence.
Treating a compliance-sensitive rubric failure as a style note rather than a knockout-equivalent finding. Fix: carry the failed criterion into the findings register and release decision.
Reusing the same reviewer instance across fix rounds instead of spawning fresh reviewers each round. Fix: start a fresh isolated pass for every iteration.
Inferring "approved terminology" or "jurisdiction-appropriate language" from a similar past tender instead of the current ToR/RFP (see rules/common/core.md). Fix: mark the check NOT_ASSESSED until the current buyer document is available.
Shipping on a fourth iteration instead of escalating after round 3. Fix: stop at the third failed round and escalate to the accountable signatory.
Presenting a single-reviewer or self-review pass as a dual-review PASS. Fix: label simulated isolation and retain its limitation explicitly.