The president of the American Small Business League in Petaluma, California, is taking issue with statistics released by the federal government when it comes to small business spending.

The Orange Country Register reports that ASBL president Lloyd Chapman disputed the government's assertion that it had given $96.8 billion in federal contracts to small business owners around the country in 2009. Chapman said that much of the money the government claimed went to small businesses ended up going to large, multi-national corporations.

While the U.S. Small Business Administration claimed that a record 23 percent of federal contracts went to small businesses, according to the the ASBL, "the actual percentage of contracts awarded to small businesses is closer to 5 percent ... Of the top 100 recipients of federal small business contracts ... 60 large firms received 64.5 percent of the total dollars the government claimed to have awarded to small business," the news source quoted the group as saying.

In a recent statement, the ASBL was largely critical of the current president's use of government money. "Not only has the Obama Administration shortchanged small businesses with stimulus funds," the group wrote in a letter to Ben Bernanke, "but also information released by the Obama Administration clearly shows that every month President [Barack] Obama has been in office, billions of dollars in small business contracts are being diverted to large businesses."