Yet another example of Washington's incompetence and malfeasance emerged in a report from the Department of Interior Office of Inspector General (DOI-IG). That report showed $5.7 million arriving in big business wallets in fiscal years 2006 and 2007.
The Project on Government Oversight blog cited the report's findings on the reasons for such generosity to companies that are otherwise unqualified for such contracts. Data entry mistakes, reliance on incorrect data, and the failure of contracting officials to verify business size data all received blame for the problem.
That $5.7 million covered only a small slice of the real problems with the Bush Administration and its agencies finding ways to hand money to the Fortune 500 at the expense of the small businesses the White House supposedly values for their economic contributions.
The American Small Business League, upon further review of the Department of Interior lists of recipients of federal small business contracts for those two fiscal years, found a lot more money hitting big businesses. They determined $430 million of those contracts landed with big business in that time.
Scrape a little farther and it gets worse. Anywhere from $65 billion to $110 billion per year in 2005 and 2006 may have been awarded to big businesses instead of the small businesses entitled to them, the ASBL claimed in June.
SBA to Answer Your Questions on Government Contracts/ProgramsWays the U.S. Government is Disappointing Small Business OwnersThe Top Five Content Management SystemsGetting A Government ContractBig Business Got Federal Small Biz ContractsTap Some Prime Government AssetsTake A Break With The Government's HelpSBA Wanting to Bring Big Businesses to Small Business Contracts?Senate Wants To Send $101M Towards Small BusinessesTime Out For Time Management | |||
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Comments
How did they not know these
Big money attract big players
When the big companies smell big money they have enough resources ($$$) to bribe those who are responsible for distribution of money among companies by awarding the contracts to donors. The human nature plays important role in this situation. People are greedy for goods and won't hesitate to accept the bribes. There is an old proverb: "if you cannot buy someone with money you can buy someone with big money".
It's not just the bold statement. I have experienced it when I was applying for grants for our potential students to teach them a new profession in IT field (7-month training). The program was designed to deliver hands-on skills and knowledge at a considerably good level, and we had excellent results!
The Higher Education Commission of State of MD (MHEC) was responsible for assigning the funds for each of the Vocational and Academic programs. To my surprise, I found that the MHEC had a member from theUniversity of MD University of MD
Let me ask you, what the unemployed worker can learn in two days what people should learn for at least 6 months? But who cares? MHEC cares? University cares? In fact, the University has created a special business unit in order to grab money from the Government pocket.
Are we talking about any fairness here? Forget about it. Your information is not a surprise to me. It happens everywhere because the Government consists of people with the same human-related problems: laziness, greediness, “don’t care” attitude, bureaucracy, political view or affiliation, the lack of conscience and ethics, etc.
This is a reason why we abandoned the plans to have ANY relashionships with our Government. We realize that it upsets potential students who has no money for education because we do not offer our most successful hands-on training program to those individuals anymore but only to the corporations. However, it gives us a "free air" to run our business as we want but not as MHEC wants when they supply the money to our students.
RZ
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