Government Operations committee  Mr. Chair, if I may interrupt for one minute, my colleagues in our office of advocacy would be quite disappointed if they knew I was so remiss as to not mention them specifically. We do have an independent office of advocacy within the SBA. Not to repeat myself, they have their own independent authority to voice the concerns and study the needs of small businesses.

Government Operations committee  I would enjoy that. Thank you, or merci, for having me. It has been a pleasure. If I can be helpful in the future, please let me know.

Government Operations committee  Sure. I want to get it into the most granular way so it's most helpful, but that's a bit of a challenge. I may need to follow up with a specific line-by-line. The SBA's budget overall, including for the field, the loan program management, my office, and some of the other education and outreach offices, is about $700 million.

Government Operations committee  Mr. Chair, I would say that everybody at the SBA needs to be doing that. To be more specific, we do have an office of communications and public liaison, which should be telling the stories of the successful little guys so that everybody becomes a little more comfortable with the fact that these great innovative companies are providing a high quality of goods and services.

Government Operations committee  Thanks for having me.

Government Operations committee  That's an excellent question. I'm going to answer it in a few ways. One, we do focus on all small businesses. We don't necessarily carve out certain types. However, the threshold for what constitutes a small business is going to be different with each industry, so to some degree that's going to show that we're looking at each industry differently.

Government Operations committee  The simplest answer to your first question on the agencies and whether we bring them together is yes, and doing so is incredibly effective. More specifically, there are a few tools that we use. We have a chief acquisition officer round table, a meeting where we do bring all those heads of the procuring centres together, just as you mentioned.

Government Operations committee  It is not centralized. Each agency has its own procurement function, with contracting officers and large procurement groups. There are actually over 3,000 buying activities. That's our phrase for places that are issuing contracts. There are 3,000 in the U.S. How do we, then, track and monitor them?

Government Operations committee  That is a great question. I don't know off the top of my head. Some are quite large, as you know, with the large prime contracts for military-type services, and some are quite small, in the hundreds of dollars. You know what? I want to know the answer to that, so I'm going to follow up and find out to the best of my ability and I will let you know, because I don't know that off the top of my head.

Government Operations committee  You've raised several very interesting points within that question. The first is that there's a real education and outreach component to what my office does, in terms of going to the agencies and helping them understand and realize that small businesses can really provide the highest-quality, most innovative goods and services out there.

Government Operations committee  It's more on the research part rather than the procurement part. The goal is to get it to the procurement part. But there are, I believe, 11 agencies whose research budgets are over the threshold at which they need to set aside that 2.5% for this program. In terms of the procurement, those goals, at 23%, and the individual goals that we set with each agency still apply, but they're not statutory as that other one is.

Government Operations committee  It's a tricky one to answer, because I don't know what the alternative would have been, what the state of affairs would look like if these didn't exist. I certainly think it's incredibly helpful or I wouldn't be doing this, but we're constantly looking at ways to improve them. Do I think they're good programs, and that the goals are good things to have, and that they encourage more small business procurement than would otherwise happen?

Government Operations committee  We do. That's one of the chief responsibilities of the procurement centre representatives I discussed. These are people out in the field, at either large military installations or at agency locations, where many contracts will be issued from. These procurement centre representatives review each contract that comes through to say that, yes, it was set aside for small businesses, so that's fine, or that no, it wasn't, but the agency has shown us the market research that says small businesses could not perform this function or could not provide this good.

Government Operations committee  You're right that a lot of this is concentrated in the SBA. The banks are the intermediary for our loan programs. So the SBA will guarantee a certain threshold of the loan and participate in the processing and approval process there, but the banks, the private banking system, actually issue the loans.

Government Operations committee  Well, sir, you've hit upon the crux of my challenge in my job. Again, these are goals, but they're not necessarily set-asides. There's a slight difference. The set-aside is one of the tools we use to achieve the small business contracting goals. They're not compulsory in that there is no specific punishment for not achieving them.