PETALUMA, CA--(Marketwired - Jul 15, 2014) - According to the American Small Business League, every year by this time the Small Business Administration (SBA) releases the government scorecard that reports the dollar volume and percentage of federal contracts awarded to small businesses. The SBA has a track record of releasing the data in a manner to reduce media pick up. They prefer to release the data late on a Friday afternoon preferable just before a three-day weekend.
Last year the FY 2012 Scorecard was released just before the July 4th weekend as the American Small Business League predicted in their July 1, 2013 press release.
The SBA has made no announcements as to why the release of the data has been delayed. Every year for the last decade, when the SBA releases their data it prompts a number of stories in the press regarding the SBA's inclusion of hundreds of Fortune 500 firms and other clearly large businesses in their small business statistics.
Every year since 2003, when it is reported that Fortune 500 firms are receiving federal small business contracts, the SBA insists the inclusion of billions of dollars in federal contracts to Fortune 500 firms is the result of miscoding, computer glitches, anomalies, data entry errors and simple human error. The SBA has never been asked why the alleged random errors do not have a random pattern of distribution, but always divert small business contracts to large businesses.
In 2011 the SBA claimed the data was clean and free of data anomalies such as miscoding. That year 61% of the top 100 recipients of federal small business contracts were large businesses. In 2011, 72% of the top 100 recipients of small business contracts were large businesses. In 2012, 235 Fortune 500 firms received federal small business contracts. In 2013, 175 Fortune 500 firms received federal small business contracts.
Some of the firms that have been included in the SBA's small business contracting data include, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, IBM, AT&T, General Electric, Dell, Lockheed Martin, Textron, PepsiCo, Disney, British Aerospace Engineering (BAE) and Rolls-Royce. According to a story in The New York Times, Rosoboronexport in Russia received $378 million in federal small business contracts in 2011.
The American Small Business League is preparing to file a Freedom of Information Act request to force the SBA to release the FY 2013 Scorecard. ASBL also plans to file an injunction in Federal District Court in San Francisco to stop the SBA from including contracts to corporate giants in their federal small business contracting data.