Recent Court Decisions Provide Insight for Government Contractors into the Contract Disputes Act's Statute-of-Limitations Provision

The statute-of-limitations provision of the Contract Disputes Act (CDA), effective since 1995, provides that parties have six years to bring a claim related to a government contract.  41 U.S.C. § 7103(a)(4)(A).  Due to both the relatively recent effective date and the six-year period itself, there have been very few court decisions to guide parties in understanding when their claims accrue and the six-year statute-of-limitations period begins to run.  In the past six weeks, however, the U.S. Court of Federal Claims and the Armed Services Board of Contract Appeals have issued three decisions that provide insight into the Federal Acquisition Regulation’s (FAR) definition of claim accrual, i.e., that a claim accrues when “all events, that fix the alleged liability of either the Government or the contractor and permit assertion of the claim, were known or should have been known.” FAR 33.201.