Bill Aims For Accurate Procurement Data Several House members are drafting legislation designed to stop large corporations from being counted as small businesses in federal contracting. The bill is the latest attempt to clean up procurement data that artificially inflates small firms’ share of the federal market. The bill would prohibit any publicly traded company or its subsidiary from qualifying as a small business. It would require all agencies to publicly list the small businesses that have been awarded contracts. Repeated investigations have found that many large corporations are being counted as small ones in official federal contracting reports. When SBA and the Office of Management and Budget attempted to scrub the procurement data, they identified $4.6 billion in contracts in 2005 that were credited to small businesses but went to large corporations. The Democratic staff if the House Small Business Committee said the actual figure was $12 billion, about 15% of all small business awards. (SAA, 7/11/08) Even after that scrub, the Interior Department inspector general last year found subsidiaries of John Deere Co., Dell Inc., Home Depot, Waste Management Inc. and other large companies listed in federal databases as small. SBA has blamed the erroneous information on data-entry errors, but critics – most notably Lloyd Chapman, president of the American Small Business League – have long contended that large companies were masquerading as small ones in order to qualify for contracting preferences. The Small Business League is backing the new legislation. According to a draft of the bill, it calls for a five-year debarment for any company that fraudulently claims to be a small business. It would allow anyone to file a complaint against a business suspected of misrepresenting its size status to receive a contract.