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The end of the Fiscal Year is upon us, which typically coincides with a flurry of procurement activity and then a wave of bid protests. As most of you know, there are three primary fora for bid protests: procuring agencies, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), and the Court of Federal Claims (COFC). Although the COFC has relatively lenient timeliness rules, agencies and GAO have short, strict, and fairly draconian timeliness rules for filing protests. So as the protest season approaches, we thought it was a good time to refresh everyone on the rules so you are not disappointed to find that you are too late to file your protest.

There are two general categories of timeliness rules to consider: those impacting challenges to the terms of the solicitation and those for challenges to most other procurement improprieties.[1] Importantly, when assessing protest allegations, one must consider that each allegation must independently satisfy the timeliness rules and this requirement applies both in the context of the initially filed protest and all subsequent supplemental protests.