Contracting Barriers Causing Agencies To Flunk Their Contracting Goals... Again!

Sept. 20, 2010 - PRLog -- Although the Federal government has doubled its procurements in the last eight years to more than $500 Billion, it has continued to deny small businesses their 23% statutory share, according to the figures published on the SBA 2009 Report Card,   “As long as the known ‘barriers,’ to contracting with small businesses, are allowed to exist and the laws that protect their rights are not enforced, the Agencies will continue to fail in their efforts,” said Raul Espinosa, head of a procurement Think Tank operated by the Fairness in Procurement Alliance (FPA) at The University of North Florida (UNF).

“The Task Force must consider our entrepreneurial efforts to bring, under one umbrella, all essential contracting services - including the funding of contracts - to benefit federal, state and local programs," said  Dr. Henry Thomas, UNF Professor and co-founder, with Espinosa, of the procurement Think Tank.

“Congress will send the wrong message to states and local governments by allowing Federal agencies to continue to fail at meeting their statutory and socio-economic goals,” said Dr. Carlton Lamar Robinson, Research Director for the Think Tank. “Compliance and alignment with the Federal statutes is the only viable solution to bring fairness to public procurement at the State and municipal levels.”

The mission of the Think Tank’s Umbrella Initiative is “to double the number of small businesses contracting with the government by the year 2020.”   The Think Tank has identified many of the barriers    including public laws  enacted, but not enforced, to protect the rights of small businesses. They were both incorporated into recommendations to the White House Task Force on Government Contracting.  

The Think Tank is also discussing its case with the American Bar Association (ABA) whose new President, Stephen Zach, has proposed a Preservation of the Justice System core initiative  focused on addressing violations of Legal Rights and access to justice which are issues which the Think Tank is addressing.  One of the key elements of The Umbrella Initiative is the establishment of a ‘Legal Center’ to protect the statutory rights of small businesses, which the Think Tank has demonstrated, have been grossly violated.
 
Since the SBA Scorecard was conceived in 2005 to create transparency and measure the compliance of Federal Agencies with a Congressional statutory mandate, SBA has shown that Federal Agencies have failed at meeting their own goals every year. Research by Eagle Eye Publishers, commissioned by FPA, on the other hand, has shown the figures Agencies have reported to SBA were wrong.  Espinosa has claimed that, “the endemic misreporting practice could easily be stopped by getting OMB to enforce the Data Quality Act (DQA). “
 
The SBA Inspector General has acknowledged  that the SBA’s biggest challenge has always been “stopping large businesses from taking small business contracts and preventing Agencies from taking credit for small business contracts awarded to large businesses.”

“The Federal Agencies data reported on the SBA Report Card is skewed,” said Roger Campos, MBRT President. “The data is dramatically inflated,” said Lloyd Chapman, ASBL President “The goals have never been met,” said Anthony Robinson, President of MBELDEF..

States with large underserved communities such as Florida, for example - with 680,263 minority businesses  - have never tracked those businesses nor the contracts they are receiving at the State and local government.  “Such tracking along with an alignment with the Federal statutes is necessary to give minority businesses ‘maximum practicable utilization’ (MPU) in government contracting as required by P.L. 95-507,”   said Dr. Lamar Robinson.  Communities with significant minority population like Jacksonville, Miami and Orlando, for example, could achieve noteworthy results by relying on an SDB dashboard to track state and municipal government contracts in similar fashion as the Federal government.

The Think Tank has developed a plan to help the State offer a unified procurement solution so that all State and municipal contracts could be listed and accessed in one place. Such efforts are critical to facilitate and encourage small business participation in government contracting.

Small businesses are responsible for half the nation’s gross domestic product, more than three quarters of the jobs and more than half the NEW jobs created, yet the Federal government has denied them their statutory 23% share of government contracts; have allowed ‘barriers’ to contracting to exist and have not enforced the laws that protect their rights.

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The FPA mission is to bring fairness to public procurements so that small and disadvantaged businesses can both compete and prosper at the federal, state and local levels.