SBA scores federal small business procurement efforts

WASHINGTON – In an effort to increase the transparency and accountability in small business contracting, the U.S. Small Business Administration has released its first-ever Small Business Procurement Scorecard. The Scorecard will help agencies measure their achievements and progress in making contracting opportunities available to small businesses, improve the accuracy of contracting data regarding small businesses, and provide the public the opportunity to assess agencies’ performance in meeting these goals.

Seven federal agencies: the Departments of Agriculture, Energy,Homeland Security,Housing and Urban Development, Transportation,Veterans Affairs, and the SBA itself, met their small business contracting goals.

The SBA’s Scorecard builds on a series of administration initiatives to improve small business access to federal contracts. At the request of the White House’s Office of Federal Procurement Policy and the SBA, federal agencies spent months reviewing 11 million contract actions from the last two years to cleanse the database of miscoded contracts. On June 30, federal regulations were changed. Contracts awarded to small companies acquired by large corporations will no longer count towards federal agency small business goals — even if the acquisition took place before the rule change.

“These changes — increased accuracy, transparency and accountability — provide a real window of opportunity for America’s small businesses,” said SBA Administrator Steven Preston. “Almost $5 billion in misreported contracts have been cleaned out of the small business database.To meet their goals in 2007 and beyond, federal agencies know they will have to place more new contracts with small businesses. SBA is also increasing its staff and technical assistance to help our federal partners meet their contracting needs.”