By ASBL, Special for USDR
A new investigative report by government watchdog group Public Citizen titled “Slighted” details how the Obama Administration has falsified both the percentage and volume of federal contracts awarded to small businesses. The article explains how the federal government’s compliance with the 23% federal small business contracting goal is fabricated.
The subtitle of the Public Citizen report states, “Accounting Tricks Create False Impression That Small Businesses Are Getting Their Share of Federal Procurement Money, and the Political Factors That Might Be at Play.”
The article highlights the unrelenting efforts of the American Small Business League founded by national small business advocate,Lloyd Chapman, to expose fraud in federal small business contracting programs. The report states, “One window of insight comes from research by the American Small Business League (ASBL), a longstanding, relentless critic of the government’s fulfillment of its small business obligations.”
The Public Citizen report agreed with previous investigations by the ASBL over the last decade that found the federal government had cheated legitimate small businesses out of billions of dollars in federal contracts in two main ways.
- The Small Business Act mandates that small businesses receive a minimum of 23% of the total value of all federal contracts. TheSBA uses a significantly lower budget number than the actual total procurement budget that greatly inflates the percentage of federal contracts to small businesses.
- The Federal Government greatly exaggerates the volume of federal contracts awarded to small businesses by including billions of in federal contracts to Fortune 500 firms, their subsidiaries and thousands of large businesses. The Small Business Act clearly defines a small business as being independently owned and having no more than 1500 employees. The definition independently owned would exclude any Fortune 500 firms since they are publicly owned and obviously have more than 1500 employees.
SBA Press Office Director Terry Sutherland continues to refuse to talk with journalists and answer any questions about the SBA’s use of illegal policies to inflate and falsify the government’s small business contracting data or their excuse that random errors they call “miscoding” is responsible for the diversion of federal small business contracts to Fortune 500 firms for more than 15 years.
Public Citizen found the American Small Business League was the only national small business advocacy group that had ever publicly opposed the diversion of federal small business contracts to corporate giants.
Every year since 2005, including SBA Inspector General Peg Gustafson, the SBA Inspector General has named the diversion of federal small business contracts to large businesses as the number one problem at the SBA.
President Obama’s 2016 Budget includes the resurrection Ronald Reagan’s plan to permanently close the SBA and end all federal small business programs by combining the agency with the Department of Commerce.
SOURCE American Small Business League
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