Insights

In Aim for AdVantage, LLC, GAO dismissed a protest as a sanction after finding that the protester had materially misrepresented the facts underlying its challenge to the rejection of its proposal. The protester claimed it had spent two hours trying to submit its proposal through the agency’s digital portal before the deadline, only to be thwarted by undisclosed system limitations.  But a forensic review of the protester’s account activity told a very different story – one in which the protester had not even attempted to access the portal until nearly an hour after the deadline had passed. GAO’s decision to dismiss the protest as a sanction for these misrepresentations serves as a stark warning: fabricating facts in a GAO protest may result in serious consequences.

The following is an installment in Crowell & Moring’s Bid Protest Sustain of the Month Series. In this series, Crowell’s Government Contracts Practice keeps you up to date with a summary of one of the most notable bid protest sustain decisions each month. Below, Crowell Consultant (and former GAO Bid Protest Hearing Officer) Cherie Owen discusses GAO’s decision in LJR Solutions, LLC, B-424487, Aug. 14, 2026, where GAO sustained a small business’s challenge to the National Institutes of Health’s decision not to set aside a procurement for small business concerns.