Back in my undergraduate days at Duke, I attended almost all of the home basketball games. Occasionally, sometime in the second half, with the Blue Devils up 20 points or more, an opposing player would execute an impressive dunk, and proceed to do a little celebration. I, along with my fellow Cameron Crazies, would immediately begin chanting, “scoreboard, scoreboard,” while pointing at the device in question. Our message was, “that’s nice, but it just doesn’t matter.” (Actually, we Crazies sometimes chanted “just doesn’t matter,” too).
“That’s nice, but it just doesn’t matter” is what the SBA’s Office of Hearings and Appeals had to say in a recent size appeal decision involving the question of whether employees who are sick, on vacation, or even comatose count toward a company’s employee-based SBA size standard. SBA OHA’s answer: if they’re on the payroll, they count. Period.