Sixty-one out of the top 100 recipients of federal small business contracts for fiscal year 2010 were large firms, not small businesses, says the American Small Business League (ASBL), pointing to its own analysis of a recent SBA report.

The large firms received 62.5 percent of the dollars awarded to the top 100, or $8.8 billion, ASBL says. Last week the Small Business Administration said that the federal government narrowly missed its congressionally mandated 23 percent small business goal. The SBA announced the government awarded $98 billion, or 22.7 percent of federal spending, to small businesses, it said on June 24.

“The SBA claims the government nearly hit its small business goal, and yet the government’s own data indicates it awarded no more than 5 percent of federal work to small businesses,” says ASBL President Lloyd Chapman. “The SBA’s most recent claims are just more misleading smoke and mirrors.”

The ASBL maintains that the Obama Administration has dramatically inflated the percentage of contracts awarded to small businesses by under-reporting the actual federal acquisition budget, and by including billions of dollars in contracts awarded to large businesses.

According to the Obama Administration’s most recent small business data, recipients of small business contracts during FY 2010 included Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, L-3 Communications, Hewlett-Packard, and AT&T, among many other large – not small – businesses, the ASBL says.

“It is time for the Obama Administration to stop misleading the public, and start actually working to end billions of dollars in fraud and abuse in small business contracting programs,” says Mr. Chapman. “Ending this abuse would be a more effective economic stimulus than anything proposed by the Obama Administration to date.”

Source: http://www.centralvalleybusinesstimes.com/stories/001/?ID=18765