SBA scores its procurement efforts

The scorecard is designed to help agencies measure their progress in making contracting opportunities available to small businesses improve the accuracy of contracting data regarding small businesses, and provide the public the opportunity to assess agencies’ performance in meeting these goals.

“SBA’s and the agencies’ commitment to small business contracting results is unprecedented,” said Clay Johnson, deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget, in a news release. “With clear, outcome-oriented goals, clear, realistically aggressive plans to achieve them, clearly defined accountability and frequent tracking of performance, SBA and the agencies are saying they want to be held most publicly accountable for contracting with small business at desired levels.”

SBA’s scorecard builds on a series of administration initiatives to improve small business access to federal contracts. At the request of the White House’s Office of Federal Procurement Policy and SBA, federal agencies spent months reviewing 11 million contract actions from the last two years to cleanse the database of miscoded contracts. On June 30, federal regulations were changed. Contracts awarded to small companies acquired by large corporations will no longer count toward federal agency small business goals – even if the acquisition took place before the rule change.

“These changes – increased accuracy, transparency and accountability – provide a real window of opportunity for America’s small businesses,” said SBA Administrator Steve Preston in the release. “Almost $5 billion in misreported contracts have been cleaned out of the small business database. To meet their goals in 2007 and beyond, federal agencies know they will have to place more new contracts with small businesses.”