As Craig Smith and Gary Ward recently discussed in our latest Wiley Government Contracts podcast episode, “What to Expect in Government Contracts This Year,” Fiscal Year 2023 is shaping up to be an interesting year for GAO bid protest statistics. It is the first time since we started tracking GAO’s bid protest caseload that how you count the number of protests might affect how you view the relative number of protests. This year, initial protest filings have jumped while the number of procurements subject to a protest have remained flat. The chart below shows this trend by comparing protest data from the first four months of this fiscal year with the first four months of the previous 6 fiscal years.

To learn what’s behind this divergence, listen to our latest podcast episode. For more background on different ways to count protests, see our alert on “A Data-Driven Look at the GAO Protest System.”

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