The American

Small Business League (ASBL) has filed an

injunction in Federal District Court in San Francisco against the Small

Business Administration (SBA), asking the court to stop policies the

organization claims defraud small businesses and "cheat small businesses out of

hundreds of billions in federal contracts." Specifically, ASBL takes issue with

the way the SBA categorizes the dollars awarded to small businesses when

calculating whether the federal government achieved its annual goal of

awarding 23% of contracting dollars to small businesses.

According to

the ASBL press release:

The SBA has

created a policy they call the "exclusionary

rule" and "small

business eligible dollars" that uses a significantly lower federal

acquisition budget number to calculate the percentage of contracts awarded to

all categories of small businesses. The ASBL maintains the SBA's exclusionary

policy has no basis in the law and has allowed the SBA to defraud small

businesses out of billions in federal contracts.

Data from

the Congressional Budget Office indicates a total federal budget for fiscal

year 2015 of $3.9 trillion and a discretionary spending budget of $1.2

trillion. The ASBL believes $1.2 trillion is the most accurate acquisition

budget number that should be used to calculate the volume and percentage of

federal contracts awarded to small businesses for FY 2015.

Anyone who

has been following the drama encircling the SBA's annual Small Business

Procurement Scorecard should be familiar with this complaint. In other words,

the SBA limits the larger pool of contracting dollars to a smaller chunk, when

calculating the percentage of small business contracting dollars, creating what

ASBL claims is a false impression of meeting the goals. 

The second

complaint brought in the injunction is against the so-called "five-year rule"

or "grandfathering rule," that essentially counts companies as small businesses

for five years even if they've been acquired by a larger contractor, or have

outgrown the small business definition. According to the nonprofit Public Citizen's 2015 report, "Sleighted,"

which raised a number of similar concerns:

SBA

Administrator Maria Contreras-Sweet was asked in a 2014 U.S. House of

Representatives committee hearing why contracts given to large businesses

Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and Chevron were counted toward small business

goals. "We have a rule in place that says that once you get in a contract with

government, that you are given five years. And so if a large company acquires a

small business, then it is grandfathered in for a number of years,"

Contreras-Sweet responded.

The ASBL has

been fighting this fight for a number of years, and was bolstered by Public

Citizen's report last year. This suit is going to be followed closely by just

about everyone involved in federal contracting and the reporting of data. To

read the suit in full, click here.

To view full

article, click here: http://publicspendforum.net/2016/05/05/asbl-sues-sba/