SBA released it’s first-ever Small Business Procurement Scorecard, in August, which helps the agencies in measuring their achievements as well as progress in making contracting opportunities available, in improving the accuracy of contracting data and also providing the public an opportunity to assess agencies’ performance in meeting these goals.
The function of scorecard is that, it rates performance of 24 federal agencies in meeting small business procurement goals, it also measures if they have reached their annual small business contracting goals and also measures their progress in making contracting opportunities available to small businesses. The grading system makes use of colors-green, yellow and red. This is to indicate the degree of success of the agency in meeting the stated goals and standards.
SBAs scorecard was intoduced as one of the initiatives by the Bush government to improve access to federal contracts by small businesses. On the request of the Federal Procurement Policy, White House and SBA, federal agencies spent many months reviewing as much as 11million contract actions from the past two years to clean the federal contracts database of miscoded contracts.
According to the U.S. SBA, 4th annual small business procurement scorecard, small businesses were successful in winning a record high of $96.8 billion in federal prime contracts in Fiscal Year 2009 (Oct. 1, 2008-Sept. 30, 2009). This is an significant increase of more than $3 billion from FY 2008. This represents 21.89 percent of all federal spending, which is an improvement over FY2008.
Additionally, performance of each of the government’s socioeconomic subcategories also increased for FY2009.