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Federal Market Intelligence for Small Business |
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SBA field offices staffed 14% lower than historic averageSBA official questioned on personnel, HBCUs and moreThe number of Small Business Administration field staff stationed throughout the country in SBA District Offices has shrunk in recent years and various factors are delaying attempts to boost their numbers, a senior official has acknowledged. “There has been a path of reduction in the number,” Michael Vallante, SBA associate administrator for the Office of Field Operations, said at the House Small Business Committee hearing on Jan. 29. The SBA’s field staff are present in every state and in the forefront in assisting small business owners in certifying for eligibility for government contracts and loans. Field operations reduced staffing Rep. Nydia Velazquez, D-NY, committee chair, asked Vallante to explain why the SBA supported only 687 field employees in 2019, which is a 14% reduction from the historic average of 800 personnel. Velazquez asked if budgetary limitations were the problem. The SBA has proposed flat budgets for the field offices for the last two years. The field operations budget for fiscal 2018 was $4.68 million, and the same amount was approved for fiscal 2019. Vallante acknowledged that reduced budgets were affecting operations in the field, including in the spring of 2019, when the SBA initiated a “hiring pause” due to concerns that too many new hires were in line for hiring and the budget may not support them. “Based on the number of positions in the queue, there was a question of whether they could be sustained,” Vallante said at the hearing. He didn’t specify the duration of the “pause,” except to say that it is no longer in effect. “Mr. Vallante, if you feel you don’t have the resources to staff your field operations and district offices,“ Velazquez said, “(we hope) that you will relate that to your administrator so that we see a budget that really reflects the needs of your office.” Vallante also said there were several other factors involved in decreasing the field staff, including the field operations having a higher staff turnover rate, of 14% a year, in comparison to 9% a year for SBA as a whole. “People are moving out,” Vallante said, but he offered no explanation why that was the case. There also are difficulties with SBA hiring in general, with a goal of 100 days to fill a vacancy from the day the job is posted to the day it is filled, he added. To speed up hiring, Vallante said the agency is using various hiring authorities, such as priority hiring for veterans and for former Peace Corps and Vista volunteers. Historically Black Colleges & Universities Rep. Dwight Evans, D-PA, questioned Vallante about a recent Government Accountability Office report on the SBA’s outreach to Historically Black Colleges & Universities (HBCUs) to spur black entrepreneurship. While the SBA developed a plan to support HBCUs, SBA headquarters did not communicate the plan or its goals to the SBA’s District Offices. “As a result, SBA may have missed opportunities to collaborate with HBCUs and help achieve the goals of its plan,” the GAO said. In addition, SBA did not develop performance measures or collect performance information to track how well the plan was being implemented, the report said. Evans asked how many memos SBA has signed with HBCUs, and Vallante said he would obtain that information. Asked about how the SBA has responded to GAO’s report, Vallante said that the agency has changed the way it reports HBCU outreach activities. “One of the problems is that we weren’t properly recording some of the activities. We changed our reporting tool.” To date, the SBA has hosted more than 12 events with HBCUs with more than 400 attendees in total, he said. Asked if the SBA’s plans for HBCUs are publically available, Vallante said they are for internal use at the SBA and are not public. Certify.gov There was a brief discussion of SBA’s troubled Certify.gov website. At a recent hearing, the agency’s inspector general reported that the site has so few functions that the agency is considering abandoning it. Asked by Velazquez what the agency has done to help the District Office staff cope with Certify.gov, Vallante responded that the staff members are using “work-around solutions.” “It is something we need to deal with going forward,” Vallante said.
More information:
Hearing video https://bit.ly/2vc3VDc
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Washington Insider:
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