You may have seen a blog I wrote a few weeks ago making several predictions regarding the Small Business Administration’s (SBA) release of its Small Business Goaling Report and Procurement Scorecard for fiscal year (FY) 2009. It has been customary for the SBA to release this information late on a Friday when it seems no one is paying attention, and this year is no different. To that end, this past Friday afternoon, the SBA released the government’s Small Business Procurement Scorecard for FY 2009, to very little fanfare or media attention. In fact, the only media attention I saw on this came in the form of a press release that the SBA put out, which seemed to get picked up only by a few random blogs.

Before delving into my own scorecard of predictions to see if I can get a job with the Psychic Friends Network, let us look briefly at the SBA’s scorecard. Once again, for yet another consecutive year, the government missed the mandatory 23 percent small business goal. This year, the SBA claims small businesses received approximately $96 billion in contracts, which amounted to 21.8 percent of the total dollar amount of government contracts. In order to downplay missing the goal, the SBA is selling this as a “victory” by claiming it was a record year for small businesses, which is exactly the same thing the SBA did last year when the scorecard came out. The bottom line is that even when using the government’s own numbers, which are completely flawed, small businesses lost out on billions of dollars in opportunities in federal contracts.

In checking my own scorecard of predictions, #1 was that the SBA would release the FY 2009 small business Procurement Scorecard and Goaling Report late on a Friday afternoon. As I just mentioned, that is exactly what they did; score one point for me. The other half of that prediction was that the President’s Interagency Task Force on Federal Contracting Opportunities for Small Businesses would release their report and recommendations on small business contracting at the same time. While the 90-day window the taskforce was given to issue a report is up, at this point, the White House has not released to the public the report and recommendations from the taskforce. Due to the taskforce not publicly releasing the report at the same time as the SBA released the small business scorecard, I will take away a half-point.

As a side note to the release of the SBA’s Procurement Scorecard, the SBA did not release the FY 2009 Goaling Report that normally would accompany the scorecard. The Goaling Report is an agency-by-agency breakdown, as well as the aggregate totals of contract action awards and dollars that each agency conducted with every category of small business over the course of the fiscal year. This data has not been released by the SBA, at least it does not appear in the Goaling Report section of the SBA’s website, which, like most government websites, generally takes an unusually long time to be updated. The fact that the actual numbers and data have not been released calls into question the legitimacy of the SBA’s numbers and how they arrived at the totals that they did. A study conducted earlier this year by the American Small Business League (ASBL) found that for FY 2009, legitimate small businesses actually received approximately 5 percent of the total dollars in federal small business contracts, due to the majority of those contracts being awarded to large businesses, Fortune 500 firms and multinational corporations.

This brings me to prediction #2, which was that once the contracting numbers are examined, the data will show that the majority of small business contracts actually went to large businesses. Since this point was made just above, I will chalk up one more point for me.

Prediction #3 was that the SBA will claim that large companies receive small business contracts due to “miscoding” or “simple human errors,” and that the “data is as clean as it has ever been.” The only press release issued by the SBA does not even mention large companies receiving small business contracts. And it seems that so far, no one at the SBA has talked to any reporters about this on the record. To help put this into context, the SBA’s Inspector General has said for the past five consecutive years that the number one management challenge at the SBA is,

Procurement flaws allow large firms to obtain small business awards and agencies to count contracts performed by large firms towards their small business goals.

In the press release, the SBA did state, “As it does every year, the SBA has closely examined federal procurement reporting and data to ensure the greatest level of transparency possible. After identifying anomalies in initial reports, the SBA has worked collaboratively – and will continue to work – with agencies across the government to correct as many data issues as possible, and improve the integrity of all small business federal contracting reporting moving forward.” For those of you who are not fluent in government-speak, this means that there were simple “miscoding” and “data entry” errors and that the “data is as clean as it has ever been.” Score one more point for me.

Prediction #4 was that the SBA would overstate the percentage of the federal acquisition budget and the dollar volume flowing to small businesses. Without even looking at the actual Goaling Report, I can tell you that this is accurate. Again, I will draw your attention the recent study released by the ASBL, linked here, which shows several different ways that the SBA overstates the amount of contracts small businesses receive from year to year. The most obvious being that large businesses receive billions of dollars a month in contracts that are supposed to go to small businesses. Score one more point for me.

In examining the point totals, I received 3.5 out of 4 points, which means I can fulfill my dream of being a psychic. The really sad part is what this actually means. It means that for another year, America’s small businesses have lost out on billions of dollars in federal contracts. It means that the one sector of our economy that is responsible for creating over 90 percent of net-new jobs lost out on billions of dollars in opportunities for job creation and economic growth. It means that because small businesses suffer, the U.S. economy has suffered during the worst economic downturn in over 70 years. It means that while the importance of small businesses gets thrown around quite a bit in Washington, the Obama Administration is still not serious about helping and working with small businesses. It means that until the government’s actions match its rhetoric on small business issues, I am going to hold off on starting a career as a psychic.