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GAO Critical of Agencies’ SBIR Award Administration
Anyone connected to state and local efforts to increase the performance and commercialization success of SBIR awardees will not be surprised to learn the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has issued a report critical of how well the participating federal agencies and the Small Business Administration (SBA) provide information regarding awardees.
In compiling the results for Small Business Innovation Research: Agencies Need to Strengthen Efforts to Improve the Completeness, Consistency and Accuracy of Awards Data, the GAO found several structural issues in how the participating agencies approach the administration of the grant program. Some agencies stated they did not collect all of the information required. In addition, GAO found approximately one-fourth of the data agencies submitted to SBA in 2004 and 2005 did not comply with formatting requirements, rendering it difficult to use in program evaluations and reporting.
On the subject of reporting, the SBA was found to be five years behind schedule in meeting a 2001 congressional mandate to create a database of SBIR awardees. That database, to be restricted to government-only use, was to provide the quantitative information allowing an evaluation of SBIR’s impact.
Publicly available data also suffer a time lag, reducing its utility as a measure for the effectiveness of state SBIR outreach and assistance efforts. The most recent SBIR figures available on the SBA site are 2004 state rankings: http://www.sba.gov/sbir/indexsbir-sttr.html#sbirawards.
The sheer size, scope and design of the SBIR program present some of the challenges for award data compilation. Between 1983 and 2004, the participating agencies – the number required to have SBIR programs has varied over the period – distributed more than $17 billion to small businesses via 82,000-plus grants, contracts and cooperative agreements. Each agency is responsible for footing SBIR program administration costs, resulting in some SBIR offices being significantly underfunded based on the above-average workload required to administer proposal review and grant management.
The GAO report is available at: http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d0738.pdf