Check out this GovExec article on accusations that contracts allocated for small business are being given to large contractors instead. Last week, Senator Kerry, the ranking Democrat in the Senate Small Business and Entreprenuership Committee, sent letters to Small Business Administration's head Hector Barreto and to its Inspector General Harold Damelin. Kerry charged that SBA "is fostering an atmosphere that encourages widespread fraud and abuse in small business contracting."
In December 2004, the SBA's Office of Advocacy found in a report that $2 billion of small business contracts in 2002 actually went to large corporations such as Raytheon and Northrop Grumman.
At issue is whether SBA miscoded large corporations (or their subsidiaries) as small businesses or whether these were instances of large corporations mischaracterizing themselves (or their subsidiaries) as small. However, read this bit of tongue-twisting:
[David Safavian, head of the Office of Management and Budget's Office of Federal Procurement Policy] added that letting companies self-report their size "allowed for some of these cases to sneak through the process," but that he has seen no evidence that companies are purposely lying.
Does Safavian see a difference between sneaking and lying? If you unknowingly sneak are you unpurposely lying? Whatever the answers to these ridiculous questions are, Safavian indicates that he knows self-reporting is a failure--on his watch! But he doesn't seem to have a problem with it. Is this the type of chap we want as head of the OMB's Office of Federal Procurement Policy?