SBA Issues Agency Procurement Scorecard

In August, the Small Business Administration released its first ever Small Business Procurement Scorecard. The scorecard rates 24 federal agencies’ performance in meeting small business procurement goals: whether they have reached their annual small business contracting goals and their progress in making contracting opportunities available to small businesses. The grading system uses colors—green, yellow, and red—to indicate the agency’s degree of success in meeting stated goals and standards.

The scorecard will help agencies measure their achievements and progress in making contracting opportunities available to small businesses, improve the accuracy of contracting data regarding small businesses, and provide the public the opportunity to assess agencies’ performance in meeting these goals. For fiscal year 2006, the scorecard rated seven agencies green, five yellow, and 12 red in meeting their small business procurement goals.

In the category of progress toward making contracting opportunities available, 12 agencies were rated green, eight yellow, and four red. Each federal agency has a different small business contracting goal, determined annually in consultation with SBA. SBA ensures that the sum total of all of the goals exceeds the 23 percent target established by law.

For fiscal year 2006, $77.7 billion in federal contracts were awarded to small businesses, up $2.7 billion from the previous year. This amount is 22.8 percent of federal procurement subject to small business goals, just short of the overall goal established by law at 23 percent.

SBA’s scorecard builds on a series of initiatives by the Bush Administration to improve small business access to federal contracts. At the request of the White House’s Office of Federal Procurement Policy and SBA, federal agencies spent months reviewing 11 million contract actions from the past two years to cleanse the federal contracts database of miscoded contracts. On June 30, federal regulations were changed so that contracts awarded to small companies that were subsequently acquired by large corporations will no longer count towards federal agency small business goals—even if the acquisition took place before the rule change.

The scorecard is located at http://www.sba.gov/idc/groups/public/documents
/sba_homepage/sbgr_fy_2006_small_businesspr.html.