SAN FRANCISCO - A federal judge in San Francisco has awarded attorneys fees against the federal government in a case alleging that an agency meant to encourage small businesses instead gave billions of dollars to some the world's biggest businesses.

U.S. District Judge Susan Illston ordered the Small Business Administration to pay $54,000 to a small business advocacy organization for the expenses it incurred while trying to retrieve the documents under the Freedom of Information Act. That law allows plaintiffs who win public records cases against the government to collect attorneys fees and costs.

For months, American Small Business League, a Sonoma County-based association of hundreds of U.S. companies, has been trying to get a report commissioned by Eagle Eye Publishing. The league said that report uncovered fraud and abuse in government contracting at the Small Business Administration.

A federal law directs at least 23 percent of its government contracting dollars or about $80 billion a year to small businesses.

"I'm trying to prove that most federal small business contracts go to Fortune 1000 companies and their subsidiaries," said Lloyd Chapman, president of the American Small Business League.

Chapman cited the Carlyle Group, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Oracle and Hewlett-Packard as examples of companies receiving small business contracts.

Chapman intends to file a similar suit next week against the SBA for records of protests filed by small companies bypassed for contracts. Chapman wants to prove that the SBA dismisses most of those protests.

For more than a dozen years, according to Chapman, the large companies have defrauded the SBA falsely proclaiming themselves as small businesses.

"Cheating small business is a bipartisan issue," he said.

The SBA initially denied the report existed, Chapman said. Then it refused to release the report because it claimed it was a trade secret owned by Eagle Eye Publishing. It later said the report was a privileged communication between the government and the publishing house.

The U.S. attorney's office in San Francisco, which represented the Small Business Administration, did not respond to requests for comment.

Illston said the Small Business Administration asked the judge to either deny the fees or reduce them.

"The only way to encourage people to vindicate public access rights is to award fees," said Karl Olson, an attorney with Levy, Ram & Olson in San Francisco who represents newspapers and broadcasters. "Otherwise it can be prohibitively expensive to obtain public records."

Olson said Chapman's case against the SBA sounded "pretty righteous."