[bmelton]

The only real answer to give you is to hire a lawyer whose specialty that is. The government (and perhaps any client) is going to take your answer and run it past their legal team, so unless you can bullshit to the extent that would pass actual legal scrutiny, it's probably best to not bother.

The hard fact of the matter is that you almost certainly are infringing on something in today's murky IP landscape, so the expectation is almost certainly less likely to get a document from you saying that you aren't infringing, rather, to get a document that explains the defensibility of your claims where you are infringing.

Interesting to me is that I've developed a broad set of applications for various government agencies, and I've never once been asked to prove anything similar to this. I don't know if you're responding to a bid with competitors, but my (wholly uneducated) guess is that perhaps one of the competitors brought it up in an effort to smear you, and even if your IP is defensible, the extra work involved might be enough to give them a win over you.