The SBA Office of the Inspector General has taken it upon itself to look at the SBA’s programs and activities in order to determine what risks the SBA may face in the 2020 Fiscal Year. It appears that the OIG did not like what it found.
The examination found multiple risks and problems associated with SBA programs, including the 8(a) program, the WOSB program, and SBA’s small business contract goaling methods.
Continue readingIn 2016, SBA established the All Small Mentor-Protégé Program, or ASMPP, enabling mentors of any size to provide business development assistance to small protégé businesses to enhance the protégé’s ability to compete for federal contracts. Since then, the ASMPP has served as a powerful tool for many businesses and, as of August 1, there were 885 active mentor-protégé agreements.
Recently, however, the SBA’s Office of the Inspector General released a report highlighting some opportunities to improve the program and recommending SBA take additional steps to ensure compliance with the program’s requirements.
Continue readingLast year, we wrote about the SBA’s Office of Inspector General’s concerns with the SBA’s review of potential 8(a) participants’ eligibility. In this report, the OIG made three recommendations aimed at improving to verify applicants’ eligibility.
Just last week, the OIG released a new report analyzing the 8(a) Program. This report picks up where the earlier report left off—it addressed several issues in the SBA’s evaluation of participants’ continuing eligibility.
The results of this report are rather alarming: based on its review, the OIG identified almost $127 million in 8(a) set-aside awards to ineligible firms.
My poor, long-suffering Chicago Cubs will spend another winter without a World Series trophy. Maybe next year the Cubbies will finally break the Curse of the Billy Goat. In the meantime, there is plenty happening in the world of government contracting to keep my mind off of baseball.
In this week’s SmallGovCon Week In Review, a prison sentence is handed down in a SDVOSB fraud case while guilty pleas are entered in a separate case alleging DBE fraud, President Obama vetoes the 2016 NDAA, Carroll Bernard of GOVOLOGY provides an overview of the non-manufacturer rule, and much more.