Open Dialogue on Improving How to Do Business with the Federal Government Ideas

Currently there is a Commercial Items test programs that allows use of SAP up to $6.5M for commercial items, or NDIs that have been sold to State and Local Governments. Unfortunately some design activities are wary about providing commercial item determinations because they fear it could cause them to lose control of the item to another design activity or lose Quality Assurance capabilities. There is also a military ...more »

Growing small businesses and diversifying the pool of federal contractors are important goals. However, recently, there have been several highly publicized examples of small business contractors who shortchanged workers on federal jobs. While small businesses may not be able to meet all the experiential criteria that are part of the responsibility determination, there needs to be a mechanism in place to ensure that ...more »

SBA mandates that small subcontractors be paid quickly by primes when the government pays quickly. This would extend the same requirement to small businesses that are team members on Contractor Teaming Agreements under the GSA MAS program.

I noticed there are not a lot of different opportunities available for WOSBs across various NAICS codes. I receive alerts from FBO for my NAICS codes. However, I haven't received many that are set aside for WOSBs. There needs to be more opportunities across different NAICS codes. I know there are many NAICS codes that are eligible for WOSB set aside, but I haven't seen many contracts advertised that fall under many of ...more »

It is expensive, time consuming and distracting for small businesses to prepare proposals. For some of the larger federal contractors in the Department of Energy, a new method of "Award Term" has been used to reward exemplary performance by addiing additional years to the term of the contract for each year of high performance. This would help many small businesses who often invest a year or two of profit on a three-five ...more »

The current system relies heavily on an assumption that everyone knows how to navigate the various technologies inherent in government contracting. The human element is inadequate.

Question 1: How can we make doing business with the government easier and less costly for small businesses, minority businesses, new entrants, and non-traditional government contractors? Answer 1: So far I have not encountered any costs with trying to start a business, because I am doing extension research first. I do see there are a lot of costs to get started. Question 2: If you are a small business, minority ...more »

Mid-tier businesses have valuable government contracting experience and power the economy by subcontracting with small business concerns. Prohibiting these dollars from counting towards an agency’s socioeconomic goals artificially reduces the apparent government investment in such companies. As a result, SBA goals are treated with heightened importance, creating greater exclusion of sources in open competition and increasing ...more »

The current structure for agency reporting relevant to small business utilization goals is flawed, in that it allows agencies to grossly misinterpret the intent of the these goals. Agencies are required to report dollar volumes at this time. This is an accurate representation of whether or not the dollars are going to small businesses, but it is not an accurate representation of how many small businesses are receiving ...more »

Government has been doing great things on setting up policies like "Cloud First". Same must be considered for "Small Business First" for each and every procurement and have those evaluation/findings report publish to small business so, businesses can improve on how decisions were made. This provides opportunity for small business to improve and extend services as expected.

Standards need to be established to for how buyers are completing their due diligence as it relates to verification of classifications. If the government worked to align its practices between systems, regulated/verified information submitted, and created a more holistic structure of classifications, the government would see better practices, overall increased compliance, and enhanced utilization of small businesses. ...more »

Given the breadth of the complaints, perhaps it is time to create a new major panel similar to the Section 800 panel to address this issues in depth and systematically. Such a group could have the support of both the Congress and the Administration and the product of that group would be much more likely to obtain broad support, as FASA received overwhelming bi-partisan approval and resulted in significant change.