The federal government failed to meet its goal of awarding
23 percent of its procurement dollars to small businesses,
according to preliminary 2007 data.
The official numbers won't be released until August,
but it appears small businesses received 22.1 percent of
federal contracting dollars in 2007, said Calvin Jenkins,
the Small Business Administration's deputy associate
administrator for government contracting and business
development.
That percentage was down from 2006, when small
businesses' share was 22.8 percent, also short of the
goal.
More money flowed to small businesses last year, however,
because overall federal contracting increased to more than
$436 billion.
Hitting the 23 percent goal was harder for agencies last
year because they could no longer count contracts awarded to
small businesses that were acquired by large businesses.
Until last year, agencies could count these awards as small
business contracts for the life of the contract. In addition, the SBA worked with federal agencies to
improve the quality of contracting data.
In the past, billions of dollars were credited to small
businesses for contracts that actually went to large
businesses.
The SBA and the Office of Federal Procurement Policy
removed $4.6 billion of miscoded contracts from the 2005
small business database, and the data scrubbing continued
for the 2006 and 2007 goaling reports.
Agencies also were ordered to establish procedures for
verifying contracting data and were graded on their efforts.
This year, for the first time, they were required to certify
the accuracy of their contracting data.
The SBA also asked large businesses to make sure none of
their contracts was being counted as a small business
contract.
These efforts to get the numbers right are having a
"major effect" on agencies' ability to hit
their small business goal, Jenkins said.
The Interior Department miscoded contracts to these Fortune
500 companies as small business contracts:
The Home Depot Inc. Dell Inc. Deere & Co.
Weyerhaeuser Co. Xerox Corp. Waste Management Inc.
Sherwin-Williams Co. McGraw-Hill Cos. Starwood Hotels
& Resorts
Source: Office of Inspector General, Interior Department, Kent Hoover - The Business Review