Is the SBA Hurting Small Business?
Long a champion of small business, Lloyd Chapman, the founder and president of the American Small Business League (ASBL), a federal small-business policy watchdog group based in Petaluma, Calif., is also an arch critic of the Small Business Administration.The ASBL was originally set up to stop fraud, abuse, and loopholes that allow money and contracts intended for small businesses to be diverted to large companies. Since its founding, the group claims to have helped remove hundreds of large companies from the Small Business Administration’s (SBA) database. It also provoked a General Accounting Office investigation that resulted in the federal government confirming that many government contracts were actually going to big businesses.
Chapman’s work continues apace. Indeed, last year he filed two lawsuits against the SBA for information pertaining to contracting fraud, and he says he’s gearing up to file two more. He recently spoke with BusinessWeek Online Staff Writer Stacy Perman about the importance of small business to the American economy and what he views as the current hostile environment toward small businesses that has been fueled by the Bush Administration. Edited excerpts of their conversation follow:
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