Washington, DC – After three decades of the small business federal contracting community voicing concerns with regard to subcontracting and after the same three decades of attempts to work with the Small Business Administration (SBA), Congress, and large companies, in order to enforce consistent subcontracting performance, it is clear that the thirty-year advocacy effort by the small business federal contracting community has not resulted in ensuring consistent enforcement of the subcontracting regulations.

The community is also alarmed by the fact that regulations, which are now proposed by the SBA after more than twenty years of failing to consistently meeting the spirit and letter of subcontracting regulations, are essentially designed to continue the practice of mandating a largely ineffective review process that assigns additional duties to contract officers and agency heads. Current regulations already place the burden of subcontracting enforcement on these contract officers and agency heads and allow for penalties to enforce subcontracting compliance. However, consistent enforcement of these regulations has not occurred on a consistent and credible basis.

Given the current state of affairs, how does SBA expect these same individuals to enforce additional rules, when they seem to have been unwilling or unable to consistently enforce current regulations for over thirty years? Since the inception of the federal subcontracting program, large businesses have not been consistently true to the letter or spirit of federal subcontracting regulations and the SBA has shown no consistency in addressing this problem.

For the first time in the history of the nation, the small businesses that do business with the federal government have organized at the grassroots level to develop private sector driven solutions on the federal subcontracting program focusing attention first on the interests of the taxpayer, second the interest of the agencies’ missions that rely on contracting support, and third on the nation’s private sector community, which includes small business and large business. The National Federal Contractors Association (NaFCA) has succeeded in implementing the Solutions Summit initiatives, which focus on developing solutions and not on spending much energy on complaining and demonstrating frustration.

More information on these issues and solutions to the ongoing subcontracting concerns of small businesses, which were developed in this manner, are presented on NaFCA’s website at www.nafcausa.com. A video recap of a recent Solution Summit is available at: http://nafcausa.com/youtube.htm.