PETALUMA, CA--(Marketwired - May 9, 2014) - The following is a statement by the American Small Business League: Newly appointed Small Business Administration (SBA) head Maria Contreras-Sweet is scheduled to speak in San Francisco on Monday, May 12 to kick off Federal Small Business Week. Attendance to Contreras-Sweet's speech is being limited.
Contreras-Sweet will be speaking at Twitter Headquarters in San Francisco Monday, May 12, 2014 from 7:30AM to 12:00PM. Address: 1355 Market St. San Francisco, CA 94103.
One of the issues Contreras-Sweet will likely hope to avoid is the continuing federal investigations and media reports that have found hundreds of billions of dollars in federal small business contracts that have been knowingly diverted to Fortune 500 firms.
Every year of the last eleven years, federal investigators and investigative journalists have found Fortune 500 firms were the actual recipient of billions of dollars in federal small business contracts. The most recent data from the Federal Procurement Data System indicates that 175 Fortune 500 firms received federal small business contracts last year and 250 the previous year.
The Small Business Administration Office of Inspector General, headed by Obama appointee Peg Gustafson, has named the diversion of federal small business contracts to large corporations as the number one problem at the SBA every year for the last six years.
After investigating the SBA, the Government Accountability Office essentially accused federal officials of encouraging fraud when they released report 10-108 that stated, "By failing to hold firms accountable, SBA and contracting agencies have sent a message to the contracting community that there is no punishment or consequences for committing fraud."
A recent legal opinion by Professor Charles Tiefer, one of the nation's leading experts on federal contracting law, found that legitimate small businesses might have been fraudulently cheated out of over one trillion dollars.
In an apparent attempt to limit media coverage of the well-documented fraud and abuse in federal small business contracting programs, former head of Corporate Communications for the Pentagon Force Protection Agency, retired Naval Commander Terry Sutherland took control of the SBA Press Office in April of 2013. Sutherland has repeatedly declined to comment on the abuses. www.terrysutherlandinfo.org
The American Small Business League (ASBL) predicts the SBA's policy of diverting billions of dollars in federal small business contracts to Fortune 500 firms will continue under Administrator Contreras-Sweet's tenure.