An analysis by the American Small Business League (ASBL) has uncovered 179 Fortune 500 firms and their subsidiaries received federal small business contracts in fiscal year 2014. The study was based on the most recent information available from the Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS).
The largest recipient of federal small business contracts was Verizon. Some of the other firms that received federal small business contracts in recent years include: Chevron, Apple, General Electric, AT&T, CVS, Hewlett Packard, UPS, Bank of America, Home Depot, Target, Microsoft, Wells Fargo, Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Boeing, Oracle, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, Honeywell International, BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce, Sears and John Deere.
The ASBL research is consistent with the recent investigative report released by Public Citizen titled “Slighted: Accounting Tricks Create False Impression That Small Businesses Are Getting Their Share of Federal Procurement Money, and the Political Factors That Might Be at Play.”
ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, Fox News and RTTV along with dozens of stories in many of the largest newspapers in the country have all reported on the fraud and abuse in federal small business contracting programs.
As early as 2003, the Government Accountability Office uncovered over 5,300 large businesses were receiving federal small business contracts.
On June 26, the Pentagon and the SBA ignored the results of the May 6 Public Citizen report and held a joint meeting to claim 24.99 percent of all federal contracts were awarded to small businesses. Billions in contracts to Fortune 500 firms and their subsidiaries were included in that number.
The research by ASBL, Public Citizen and federal investigators has found the SBA’s data to be significantly inflated in two ways. The SBA uses a rule they fabricated called the “exclusionary rule” to use a much lower federal acquisition budget in calculating the percentage of awards to small businesses. The SBA also unlawfully created a “five year rule” to include billions of dollars in contracts to Fortune 500 companies and their subsidiaries in their small business data.
Both the “exclusionary rule” and the “five year rule” have no basis in law and are in direct conflict with the provisions of the Small Business Act. The Small Business Act defines a small business as having no more than 1500 employees and requires small businesses receive “not less than 23 percent of the total value of all prime contract awards for each fiscal year.”
The House Small Business Committee unanimously adopted an amendment to call for a new GAO investigation into fraud in federal small business contracting programs, based on research done by Chapman’s ASBL.
Senate Small Business Committee Chairman, David Vitter, has demanded that SBA Administrator Maria Contreras-Sweet provide him with a complete list of all firms that received federal small business contacts in fiscal year 2014 for an upcoming hearing on the issue.
