A California man faces up to 20 years in prison after pleading guilty to 8(a) fraud charges.
According to a Department of Justice press release, Wesley Burnett admitted that his non-8(a) companies performed all of the work required under various 8(a) set-aside contracts. And if the pass-through scheme wasn’t enough, Burnett also admitted to falsely self-certifying his companies as SDVOSBs and SDBs, resulting in additional unjustified contract awards.
SDVOSBs—and basic fairness and common sense—were big winners in a recent decision issued by the U.S. Court of Federal Claims.
In its decision, the Court held that the VA’s Center for Verification and Evaluation violated the law when it disqualified a SDVOSB, without giving the SDVOSB the opportunity to contest the reasons for the disqualification. In an opinion reminiscent of last year’s landmark Miles Construction case, the Court then held that the CVE’s substantive reasons for the disqualification were arbitrary and unreasonable.
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Since its inception at Wichita State University on February 1, 2013, the Kansas PTAC has helped Kansas small businesses obtain 433 contract awards worth over $32 million. These successes should come as no surprise, because the Kansas PTAC is staffed by highly-experienced procurement professionals, who have played key leadership roles in APTAC, the national PTAC organization.
The Department of Defense met the 23% small business goal in Fiscal Year 2014, and also exceeded the 3% SDVOSB goal.
Although the SBA’s 2014 Procurement Scorecard will not be released until sometime next summer, a recent DoD press release announced the DoD’s small business successes for 2014.
The non-manufacturer rule applies only when a set-aside solicitation is designated with a manufacturing NAICS code, right? Not anymore.
A recent Court of Federal Claims case effectively invalidated SBA’s regulations that limit the application of the non-manufacturer rule to procurements for supplies. Instead, the Court held, the Small Business Act requires that the non-manufacturer rule apply any time that the Government buys manufactured products–regardless of the NAICS code assigned to the procurement.
A company’s President was deemed to control the company for purposes of the SBA affiliation rules, even though the company’s majority shareholder had the unilateral right to remove the President from office at any time.
In a recent size appeal decision, the SBA Office of Hearings and Appeals held that a company’s President exercised “critical influence” over the company, and that the President’s influence was not rendered illusory simply because the 100% owner could remove the President from office.
The SBA’s course of conduct in reviewing the 8(a) applications of companies owned by women “gives the distinct impression that the SBA is simply searching for reasons to deny every claim” of social disadvantage made by women applicants.
These strong words come from a recent SBA Office of Hearings and Appeals decision, in which OHA again overturned the SBA’s denial of a woman-owned business’s 8(a) application.