PETALUMA, Calif., May 21, 2015/PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- In response to a damaging investigative reportreleased on May 6 by Public Citizen, Louisiana Senator andChairman of the Senate Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee, David Vitter, has sent a letter to SBA Administrator MariaContreras-Sweet concerning the accuracy of the SBA'scontracting data. Specifically, Vitter requested the list of every contractorthat was counted towards the government's small business procurement goal forFY2014. Vitter also requested the size of the contractor and the amount ofcontracts awarded to that contractor.

The investigative report titled "Slighted" was based on research from the AmericanSmall Business League (ASBL)and interviews from its President Lloyd Chapman.Public Citizen found a wide variety of what they described as accounting tricks that the SBA has used to fabricate and inflate both the volume and percentage offederal contracts that were awarded to legitimate small businesses.

In the letter to Contreras-Sweet, Senator Vitter wrote,"Serious flaws undoubtedly exist in calculating and accurately reportingthe number of government contracts annually awarded to small business,"referring to over a hundred billion a year in contracts excluded from the SBA'scalculations.

An article from the Washington Business Journals by Kent Hoover quoted SBA spokesman John Shoraka admitting that the SBA had nojustifications for excluding overseas contracts from their small businesscalculations.

Also this past March, the House SmallBusiness Committee unanimously adopted an amendment to request a new Government Accountability Office investigation into fraudin federal small business contracting programs and why every year smallbusiness contracts are given to large companies, base on research done byChapman's ASBL.

Every year for the last decade, the SBA Inspector General hasnamed the diversion of federal small business contracts to large businesses as thenumber one problem at the agency. A long series of federalinvestigations have also uncovered widespread fraud and abuses in federalsmall business contracting programs, particularly focused at the Pentagon.

A number of investigative reports from the mainstreammedia have also uncovered firms like Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Rolls-Royce,Lockheed Martin and Chevron have all received federal small business contracts.

The SBA was scheduled to release their Small Business ProcurementScorecard for fiscal year 2014 at the White House on FridayMay 8, but the meeting was abruptlycancelled after stories began to surface regarding the Public Citizenreport that found the SBA numbers were inflated. Even Senator Vitteracknowledged this when he implied the SBA "cancelled at the last minute after learning that questionswould be asked about how that number was achieved."

The SBA has yet to reschedule the release of the data.