The Small Business Administration was planning to announceFriday that the federal government had met its goal of awarding 23 percent ofits contracting dollars to small businesses.

That's my assumption, at least, since SBA Administrator MariaContreras-Sweet was scheduled to release the agency's annual procurementscorecard at a White House briefing on Friday afternoon as part of NationalSmall Business Week. She wouldn't have planned such a high-profile event if thenews were bad — that, like in most years, the federal government didn't meetits small business contracting goal.

Then, late Thursday afternoon, the SBA canceled this briefing,citing "unforeseen scheduling conflicts."

This cancellation was announced an hour or so after I hadasked the SBA for a list of the top 100 small business contractors in 2014, andtold an agency public affairs specialist that I planned to ask Contreras-Sweetabout what the agency had done to ensure that their small business contractingnumbers were accurate.

Bad data has bedeviled the SBA's procurement scorecard foryears. Every year, a close look at the data finds that government agencies havecounted some contracts to large businesses toward their small business goal.Through the years, independent analyses by everyone from the SBA's owninspector general to the House Small Business Committee have documented howsmall business contracting numbers have been inflated by the inclusion of largebusinesses.

PublicCitizen joined this chorus Thursday with its own report, which shot downSBA's announcement last year that — for the first time in eight years — thegovernment had met its small business contracting goal. Using data the AmericanSmall Business League had obtained through a Freedom of Information Actrequest, the report found that some contracts awarded to Lockheed Martin,Raytheon, General Dynamics, Northrup Grumman and other giant federalcontractors were counted toward the small business goal in 2013.

Counting large businesses as small businesses is only oneproblem with the SBA's procurement scorecard. The other problem is that around$100 billion a year in federal contracts aren't even considered when the agencycalculates small businesses' share of procurement dollars. For example,contracts performed overseas aren't included in the calculations. Without theseexclusions, the small business share of federal contracting would be evensmaller.

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