To read the barrage of press releases from the American Small Business League, you'™d think the SBA can'™t do anything right The association alleges that the SBA, among other things, has devised loophole-ridden contract granting protocols that would allow venture capital firms with a controlling interest of 51 percent in a small R&D company to be eligible for small business status It would also allegedly allow franchisers to use their franchisees fronts to illegally receive federal small business contracts

The ASBL raises the specter of Fortune 1000 companies setting up divisions as franchises to receive the federal funding The ASBL also blasts the Bush administration for allegedly stalling implementation of a procurement process for woman-owned businesses

ASBL has filed a series of lawsuits against the SBA to make the agency provide names of companies that have been coded as small businesses for the purpose of federal contracting ASBL charges that corporate giants such as Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and Titan are on that list

SBA Administrator Hector Barreto stepped down this month, replaced by Steven Preston, former executive vice president of ServiceMaster But the ASBL raises questions about Preston'™s qualifications for the job, because Preston has never run a small business ASBL also voices concern about the franchisee issue

Lloyd Chapman, the president of ASBL, is claiming that the current administration is gearing up get rid of the SBA all together He cites, in a January interview with BusinessWeek, that the Bush administration has not only cut the SBA budget in half but has also tried to adjust policy so that some of the biggest companies in the country could be considered small businesses

But ASBL isn'™t the only entity that'™s waxing the SBA'™s tail In 2003, the Government Accounting Office conducted an investigation finding that Barreto had allowed the reporting of billions of dollars in contracts to large companies as small-business awards, and the SBA was subsequently forced to remove the names of 600 large businesses from its PRO-NET database, the SBA'™s main directory for small business contracts And a 2005 AP story reported that the 9/11 Disaster Recovery loan program had granted less than 11 percent of its proceeds to firms based in New York

Preston was sworn in earlier this month as Barreto'™s successor