Related link: CAB Overview

Tuesday April 18, 2023, the DC Contract Appeals Board celebrated a significant milestone in our commitment to on-going and total Transparency! By transparency, we mean giving the public convenient access to Board Decisions, Orders, party filings, contract records, contracting officer decisions, vendor/government claims, IFB/RFP protest documents, and other submissions filed in Board cases (excluding records sealed pursuant to Board Orders). Effective April 18, the Board uploaded 40,831 newly digitized case records in searchable format for public access at www.cab.dc.gov. The newly uploaded records add approximately 1.2 million pages of case materials to the Board website, making it a massive and transparent database containing available Board case records from our establishment in 1953 to the present.

Users of the Board’s website can now search for Opinions in some of the Board’s oldest known cases (Capitol Engineering, January 17, 1958), as well as search tens of thousands of formerly unavailable litigation documents from the 1950s-1999. (Available Board records from 2000-2023 are already on the Board’s website in searchable format.) The addition of these newly digitized case records further CAB’s longstanding commitment to transparency. As early as 2011, the CAB was recognized locally by the Washington Business Journal as having one of the most comprehensive databases of ANY government agency. The Board’s upload of the 40,831 newly digitized records evidence our continuing commitment to having one of the most comprehensive government records databases.

We encourage the public to view the Board’s website, and we plan to provide a website User Survey Tool in the weeks ahead. In the meantime, we offer the following User Tips to help simplify the case search process:

1. Although database searches can be initiated by date, case name, docket number or document text searches, searches by docket number and/or document text have been the most user-friendly in the test environment. In addition, our test environment users have found that the “Docket By Case Number” database offers prompt and consistent results for searches where the case number is already known;
    
2. As you retrieve litigation records from several of the Board’s earliest cases, you may come across pages that contain what appears to be little substantive data (e.g., file dividers, page separators, section headings, etc.). In the course of digitization, a relatively small number of pdfs fell into this category. To promote full transparency, however, these documents were uploaded along with the overwhelming tranche of substantive case records;
    
3. While the Board completes it User Survey Tool, we encourage website users to send any website feedback to “Ask The Director.” 

Finally, Transparency is one of three key Board Pillars; the other two being Efficiency Preventing Backlogs and Expertise Deciding Cases. We salute Board Judges and the entire CAB Team for their excellent performance in all three areas. A special thanks is extended to Beulah Daniel/Mark Poindexter (and their team) for leading the CAB Legacy Records Upload project.