GovCon Voices: Let’s Amend The HUBZone 35% Requirement

The HUBZone contracting program, while well-intended to provide economic and employment opportunities in otherwise low income, high unemployment areas, must nonetheless connect HUBZone firms with government contracts, the overwhelming majority of which are not located within a HUBZone.

If HUBZone firms are to experience growth, they will need to utilize the local labor force in the area where the contract is to be performed, in addition to utilizing the labor force residing in their HUBZone to perform indirect labor functions.  As a company’s direct labor force grows, their indirect labor will also grow, producing more employment opportunities within the HUBZone, thereby fulfilling an intent of the program.

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GovConVoices: Women-Owned Small Businesses Still Underrepresented On Government’s Biggest Contracts

Taken as a whole, the Government-wide performance metrics for small business utilization are encouraging.

The Small Business Administration’s FY2015 report card shows that the Government exceeded its prime contracting goals across four of the five socioeconomic categories measured. Moreover, the amount of federal spend going to small businesses reached an all-time high of over 25%.

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GovCon Voices: The Good, the Bad and the Just Plain Ugly Changes That Almost Were!

Having been a part of the federal contracting community for close to 30 years, I’ve seen quite a few changes in policy and process that have both improved and degraded the ability of small business concerns to participate as contractors and subcontractors. I’m not referring solely to changes where the language targeted small business, I’m also including those intending to change how business is done based on a specific commodity, contract cost type, procurement method, agency mission or government-wide initiative.

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Introducing GovCon Voices: A New SmallGovCon Feature

In the nearly five years (and almost 1,000 posts) since SmallGovCon began publishing, we’ve grown from a single-author blog written by yours truly, to a multi-author website featuring regular contributions from my colleagues here at Koprince Law LLC.

Growing our authorship base has allowed SmallGovCon to bring our readers expanded content that would have been very difficult for me to manage alone–like the 16 posts we wrote on the 2017 NDAA in little over a month. But as we continue to grow, I think it’s important that we also offer our readers expanded perspectives, as well.  After all, we lawyers aren’t the only ones with interesting things to say about government contracting law.  That’s why I’m excited to announce our new feature, GovCon Voices.

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