SBA hopes to cut back on the hoop jumping for government contractors, WOSBs

GOVERNMENT CONTRACTORS – The Small Business Administration is closing in on a proposed rule that will lighten the load for both its contracting officers, and the women-owned small businesses (WOSB) looking to work with the federal government.

Sean Crean, director of SBA’s Office of Government Contracting, said SBA is about 30-60 days away from putting a rule out for public comment, establishing a WOSB certification process.

“What will eventually happen, after this process is complete, we will implement a policy where contracting officers no longer have to go into an electronic file cabinet, they’ll be able to rely on the fact that SBA has now got an approved certified firm and it’ll be on parity with the other certification programs that we have like HUBzone, as well as the 8(a) program,” Crean said during said Thursday’s ChallengeHER event in Washington, hosted by SBA, Women Impacting Public Policy (WIPP), and American Express OPEN. “And then their choices as a contracting officer become very simple.”

The certification issue dates back to the National Defense Authorization Act of 2015, when Congress said it wanted two things for WOSBs, Crean said: certification for this type of small business, and for WOSBs to have sole-source contract opportunities available to them.

“When the [certification] program was initially stood up and implemented, it was stood up as a self-certification program,” Crean said. “When you submit your offer, it’s in your offering package that you represent you are small in accordance with the size standard for the contract that you’re pursuing. You can do that as a small business, you could do that as a small disadvantaged business, you could do that as a service-disabled veteran-owned small business. Then you could also do it as a women-owned small business. When this program was first stood up they didn’t take away that piece. We didn’t have a mechanism in place at SBA to be able to actually do certification.”

Today SBA has a WOSB repository, where, after a WOSB completes the required documents for a contract, it puts them into the repository where a contracting officer would need to go review those papers before awarding a contract.

“When you’re a contracting officer …. they can choose any kind of set aside of the socioeconomic interest that they want,” Crean said. “They can decide ‘do I set this aside for a historically underused business zone, or do I do it for women or do I do it for service-disabled veterans.’ When they have to go through extra hoops, we’ve seen that they won’t go through the extra hoops if they can choose an easier path.”

Along with self-representation, SBA also has four approved third-party certifiers, which do the work of reviewing a business’s documentation to say it is eligible for a particular contract.

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