White House Still Silent on New Date for Cancelled SBA Event

PETALUMA, Calif., June 2, 2015 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- A major White House event to release the Obama Administration's Small Business Procurement Scorecard was abruptly cancelled just hours before the event was scheduled to begin on May 8.

It's now been over three weeks since the event was cancelled and neither the White House nor the Small Business Administration (SBA) has announced a new date for the event. The event was to be attended by members of the President's cabinet and other senior Obama Administration executives.

Washington Business Journal's Kent Hoover reported on the decision to cancel the event which came approximately an hour after he contacted the SBA Press Office, headed by Terry Sutherland, and asked for a list of the top 100 recipients of federal small business contracts. Hoover also mentioned that he told the SBA Press Office he intended to ask SBA Administrator Maria Contreras-Sweet what the SBA had done to insure the accuracy of their small business contracting data.

Suspicions began to build that the SBA had falsified their small business contracting data after Washington based government watchdog group Public Citizen released a report titled "Slighted."

The subtitle of the report was, "Accounting Tricks Create False Impression That Small Businesses Are Getting Their Fair Share of Federal Procurement Money, and the Political Factors That Might Be at Play."

The Public Citizen investigative report was based on research from the American Small Business League (ASBL) and interviews with the organization's President Lloyd Chapman. The ASBL has begun to film a documentary on their campaign to end fraud in federal small business contracting programs. 

An article in Fortune Small Business titled "How the Feds Starve Small Contractors" reported on the problem back in 2004. In 2005, Entrepreneur magazine published an article titled "Sizing Things Up" that reported on Chapman's campaign to end small business contracting fraud. 

On May 19, Louisiana Senator and Senate Small Business Committee Chairman, David Vitter, sent a letter to SBA Administrator Maria Contreras-Sweet asking for a complete list of all the firms the SBA reported as receiving federal small business contracts in fiscal year 2014. Senator Vitter also asked for the specific volume of contracts awarded to each firm and the firm's current status as a small or large business.

Every year of the Obama Administration, SBA Inspector General Peg Gustafson, who was appointed by President Obama, has named the diversion of federal small business contracts to large businesses as the agency's number one problem.

The ASBL has begun an annual analysis of the Federal Procurement Data System's statistics for fiscal year 2014. So far, the ASBL has uncovered over one hundred Fortune 500 firms that have received federal small business contracts. Last year, the ASBL found over 70 of the top 100 recipients of federal small business contracts for fiscal year 2013 were actually large businesses.

Recent articles on Vox and the US Federal Contractor Registration found the SBA's policy of reporting awards to large businesses as small business contracts are unlawful.

Contact:
Steve Godfrey
[email protected]
707-789-9575

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SOURCE American Small Business League

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