Yesterday, the Project On Government Oversight (POGO) blogged about the American Small Business League (ASBL) and its recently released preliminary findings on the Bush Administrations Small Business Goaling Report data from 2005 and 2006. Please click here to check out POGO's blog: http://pogoblog.typepad.com/pogo/2008/06/small-business.html.
As you may know, on May 19, 2008, United States District Court Judge Marilyn H. Patel ruled in favor of the ASBL and ordered the Small Business Administration (SBA) to provide the ASBL with more than 10,000 pages of data that listed the names of all firms that received federal small business contracts for fiscal years 2005 and 2006.
A preliminary review of the data by the ASBL and two third party experts has uncovered hundreds of dramatic and glaring discrepancies in the data, which indicate that Bush Administration officials manipulated the data to disguise the true volume of government small business contracts that actually wound up in the hands of Fortune 500 corporations and other large businesses.
In a press release issued by the ASBL yesterday, ASBL President Lloyd Chapman stated, "Based upon a number of federal investigations that have been done on this subject, such as 5-14, 5-15, and 5-16 from the SBA Office of Inspector General and our analysis of this information, it looks like the pattern that we are seeing in 2005 and 2006 will be repeated every year during the Bush Administration. If that holds true, the Bush Administration will have diverted somewhere between $500 and $800 billion from our nation's middle class economy. It's time for Congress to call for a GAO investigation to get to the bottom of this issue. The Bush Administration has consistently tried to paint me as a conspiracy theorist. Based on the release of this data and the fact that I have won five federal lawsuits against the Bush Administration, I expect that will be a more difficult job for them in the future. I would like to see the media report this story accurately and responsibly and start listening to sources outside the SBA's press office. The facts don't lie."
To read more about the ASBL's findings, please click here: http://www.asbl.com/showmedia.php?id=1059
Please click here to obtain a copy of the data:
http://www.asbl.com/SBA_data/SBA.zip
Please click here to obtain a PDF file containing a list of the discrepancies uncovered by the ASBL:
http://www.asbl.com/documents/sbadatadiscrepancies.pdf
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