On October 22, 2008, the Washington Post published a story titled "Agencies Counted Big Firms as Small." The first sentence states, "US government agencies made at least $5 billion in mistakes... " They are telling us, in the first sentence, it's just "mistakes" and not fraudulent or intentional.

The Washington Post looked at a sample of $13 billion out of the $89 billion the government claimed went to small businesses. In that $13 billion sample they found what they called, "$5 billion in mistakes." That's a little over 38 percent. That's a tremendous amount of "mistakes." The $5 billion in "mistakes" were actually $5 billion in contracts that were reported as going to small businesses that in reality went to thousands of large businesses, including Fortune 500 firms.

There are two very interesting and unusual things to look at here from the newspaper that forced Richard Nixon to resign. First, why did they refer to the $5 billion as "mistakes?" How did they know these were mistakes and not intentional or an indication of fraud? How did they know this wasn't the result of blatant felony federal contracting fraud, as the SBA Office of Inspector General found three years earlier in Report 5-16? That investigation found large businesses had illegally hijacked federal small business contracts by making, "false certifications" and "improper certifications." How did the Washington Post know the $5 billion was not the result of "vendor deception" that was uncovered in an investigation by the SBA Office of Advocacy in 2004?

The second very suspicious aspect of the story is why they never applied the 38 percent of "mistakes" in the sample to the $89 billion total. A legitimate story would have reported, that based on their sample, it appeared that at least $33.8 billion in contracts reported as going to small businesses that year actually went to large businesses.

The obvious issue of why the alleged "mistakes" always divert small business contracts to corporate giants and falsely inflates the volume and percentage of federal contracts that appear to have gone to legitimate small businesses was conspicuously absent from the story.

The Washington Post undeniably tried to make it appear the $5 billion in so-called "mistakes" was the entire amount of the abuse and it was the result of random "mistakes" and not the intentional fraud and abuse by the government that it obviously is.

They clearly tried to help the federal government cover up the fact that legitimate small businesses have been intentionally cheated out of hundreds of billions in federal contracts for well over a decade.

The Washington Post continues their history of covering up fraud in federal small business contracting programs in their latest story, "Small Business Contracting Numbers Inflated by Errors and Exclusions Data Show."

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