When I was young, my parents gave me my first weekly allowance. Grand total: twenty-five cents. It doesn’t sound like much now (and it wasn’t then, either—I’m not that old!) but it was still 100% of my income. I was economically dependent on my parents.
When it comes to the SBA affiliation rules, a small business need not receive 100% of its revenues from another company in order to be considered an affiliate by virtue of economic dependence. For several years, the SBA followed a hard-and-fast rule: if a small business earned 70% or more of its revenues from another company, the two businesses were automatically affiliated.
But in Size Appeal of Argus & Black, Inc., SBA No. SIZ-5204 (2011), the SBA’s Office of Hearings and Appeals backed off the bright-line 70% rule, at least a little. In a commonsense decision, SBA OHA held that in limited circumstances, applying the 70% rule would be unfair.