Scrub of '05 Data Shrinks Small Business Share SBA said a review of 2005 federal procurement data uncovered $4.6 billion in contracts that were mistakenly recorded as going to small businesses. As a result, the 2005 small business share was revised downward to 23.4%, from 25.4% originally reported. After years of complaints about inaccuracy in the official figures maintained by the Federal Procurement Data System-Next Generation, the Bush administration ordered agencies to review and verify their 2005 contracting reports and to institute controls to improve the accuracy in subsequent years. Despite the scrubbing of data, SBA Administrator Steven Preston said, “With five and a half million contract actions in the federal government each year, this data is not perfect.” In fact, an earlier study of 2005 reports by Democrats on the House Small Business Committee found $12 billion in contracts that were mistakenly credited to small businesses. (SAA, 8/11/06) Preston said all the mistaken entries were the result of coding errors. But Lloyd Chapman, president of the American Small Business League, said, “The SBA has been unable to explain why miscoding, which should be a random occurrence, tends to happen only in situations involving contracts to large companies miscoded as small business contract awards and not as large business contract awards to small companies.” Chapman contends some large companies are fraudulently claiming small business status. “It is an insult to the intelligence of every American and every member of Congress, that the SBA thinks that people still believe that billions of dollars a year in awards to some of the nation’s largest defense contractors are the result of random data entry errors,” he wrote on the ASBL weblog. “It is absurd and ridiculous.” Preston said the increased emphasis on accurate reporting, along with the new SBA rule requiring companies to recertify their small business eligibility when they are acquired or merged, means agencies will have to seek out new small companies to meet their procurement goals. “It’s going to be tougher for these agencies to meet their numbers,” he told reporters Aug. 27. “The bar is slowly going up as these (miscoded) contracts are pulled out of the database.”