HispanicBusiness

Small businesses won a record $83.2 billion in prime federal prime contracts during 2007, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration's second annual small business procurement scorecard, which was released by the agency late last week. The report showed each socio-economic group increased its share of federal contracting dollars by at least $1 billion.

This is an increase of almost $6 billion from 2006 and does not include $3.9 billion in contracts for which size was not indicated in the FPDS-NG, the federal government's official database. Also not included was $64.8 billion in federal subcontract awards received by small businesses.

All told, FPDS-NG shows that federal agencies awarded 22 percent of their contracting dollars to small businesses, just short of the 23 percent government-wide goal. While the agency is happy to report the number of awards for federal contracts, it still needs to bolster its efforts across government to secure contracting opportunities for small businesses, said SBA Acting Administrator Sandy Baruah. Seventeen of 24 federal agencies were reported to have reached their goals for the fiscal year 2007.

"We are proud of the small business community for capturing more dollars in federal contracts and also of the agencies for making good progress in reaching their goals," said Mr. Baruah. "This year, the SBA made it more challenging for federal agencies to meet their goals, due to our initiatives to cleanse the federal contracting database of bad data, and ensure that small businesses receiving small business contracts meet the definition of small. This is good news for small businesses because it means the government will need to work harder to get federal contracts into the hands of small businesses."

He added that it also reflects the effectiveness of SBA's efforts to increase the transparency, accuracy and accountability of small business federal contracting. Release of the Scorecard this year was delayed partly because Mr. Baruah, who was appointed in August, said he wanted to personally review the process and the rationale for the ratings. He explained that it also was important that senior officials at federal agencies had the opportunity to fully review and understand their data and how they were graded.

The annual Scorecard began two years ago rating federal agency performance in meeting the overall small business goal and the component contracting goals. The project was implemented to improve small business access to federal contracts. As part of this performance scrutiny, the SBA, along with the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, ordered the federal contracting database to be scrubbed, removing many cases of non-profits, state or local governments, and large companies that were recorded erroneously as small businesses.

The agency also issued a rule a year ago requiring any small business with a federal contract to recertify its size if it merged or was acquired, and to recertify its size a minimum of every five years on a contract longer than five years. In some cases, businesses had won contracts when they were small, but then grew, merged, or were acquired by large firms and were still being recorded as small businesses.

"SBA, working with federal agencies, has made tremendous strides to ensure that the small business government contracting system has integrity, accuracy and opens opportunity for small businesses," said Mr. Baruah. "The release of the scorecard is a useful tool that allows federal agencies to track their progress and identify areas of improvement. We are committed to making government contracting programs work effectively and look forward to continuing our work with sister agencies on reaching small business procurement goals."

Scorecard results for the various government agencies awarding contracts to small businesses can be viewed at http://www.sba.gov/aboutsba/sbaprograms/goals/index.html.