More time to speak out on size standards

The Small Business Administration has extended the deadline by 60 days for comments on the advance notice of a proposed rule to the agency's effort to restructure small-business size standards. Comments are now due by April 3 instead of Feb. 1.

The comment period was extended in response to requests from the public for more time to review the issues described in the advance notice, and because of the scope and nature of the size standard issues themselves.

SBA published a proposed rule last March to re-do its small-business size standards based primarily on the number of employees of a business and by reducing to 10 the number of size-standard levels.

Most of the more than 4,000 comments on the proposed changes supported the proposal, but SBA also received a large number opposing various aspects of the agency's approach to simplifying size standards. As a result, SBA withdrew the proposal July 1.

SBA published an advance notice of the proposed rulemaking, seeking comments on several issues that were raised during the public comment period. The notice sought comments on:

• Approach to simplify size standards


• Calculation of the number of employees, including how SBA defines an employee for company-size purposes


• Use of receipts-based size standards


• Designating size standards for federal procurement


• Establishing size standards for use solely in federal procurement


• Establishing tiered size standards


• Simplifying affiliation regulations


• Simplifying small-business joint-venture eligibility regulations


• Grandfathering small-business eligibility


• Impact of size standards on regulations of other federal agencies.