Legion: Weak policies hurt vets’ small business
The American Legion has given members of Congress a list of recommendations designed to strengthen “well-intentioned but ineffective” government programs that are supposed to assure the proper award of government contracts to veteran-owned small businesses.
In written testimony submitted to a House Veterans’ Affairs subcommittee on Nov. 30, Steve L. Gonzalez, assistant director of the Legion’s Economic Division, stated “weak (government) policies and rules … limit the effectiveness of tools that are supposed to facilitate (federal) contracting opportunities (for veteran-owned businesses).” In citing the failure of government agencies to uniformly award contracts to veteran-owned business, the Legion also blamed “inadequate workforce training, (a shortage of) small business advocates and program offices…and a lack of accessibility to government agency training and outreach events that are designed to help small businesses navigate the contracting system.”
A particular target of Legion criticism was the Center for Veterans Enterprise (CVE), a program office within the Department of Veterans Affairs’ Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization. “Over the past 10 years, VA has built CVE through non-appropriated funds,” ” said Gonzalez in his testimony. “CVE markets itself as a technical training and assistance center that maintains a database of veteran-owned small businesses. (But) with regard to CVE’s technical assistance capabilities, this effort represents a negligible impact locally and virtually no impact nationally. CVE maintains one small assistance center in Washington, D.C., where they field phone calls and see a small number of clients.”
The Legion statement went on to say, “It takes anywhere from one month to one year to have a company registered with VA. One veteran complained after registering that he was deleted from the data system a few months later. Veterans cannot register multiple businesses at one time, and owners must work full time in their registered business.”
Gonzalez’s written submission also said that the qualifications of some CVE staff are questionable, the program’s website needs improvement, and the program has been subject to fraud and abuse, according to the Government Accountability Office.
“There is no doubt that government programs, including the CVE, that are designed to help veterans establish and successfully operate small businesses are well intentioned, but they are often ineffective,” said Joe Sharpe, The American Legion’s Economic Division director. “It is apparent that they are not of a high-enough priority to warrant the support that they – and the veterans they serve – warrant. This situation demands correction.”
The Legion’s congressional testimony concluded with a series of recommendations, including, “VA and the Small Business Administration should develop a comprehensive partnership to assist veterans who are interested in participating in federal procurement (and) VA should develop clearer and more comprehensive small-business contracting policies.” Specifically, the Legion recommended that Congress:
• Update acquisition policies and regulations to provide clear guidance on small business set-asides (of government contracts) and related tools.
• Provide guidance to clarify practices and strategies to prevent unjustified contract bundling (which can bypass veteran-owned small businesses in the award of government contracts).
• Identify where focused efforts will likely have the most positive effect on increasing small-business utilization in prime government contracting.
• Strengthen the skills of the appropriate program workforce by assuring that staff members are properly qualified and recurrently trained in the intricacies of small-business contracting, as well as procurement policies and regulations.
• Employ meaningful “carrots and sticks” to create a greater sense of agency accountability in the following of regulations and the meeting of small-business federal contracting goals.
• Facilitate the identification and rapid universal adoption of government agencies’ best practices with regard to encouraging veteran-owned small business.
The recommendations, said Sharpe, were formulated in part by The American Legion’s National Small Business Task Force. The task force comprises successful business owner-veterans, federal agency officials and Legion leaders; its mission is to gather information and conduct research regarding the economic status of veteran businesses.