Small business | In brief

The Navy's Space and Warfare Systems Command Center in Charleston, S.C., will release a solicitation Aug. 21 for a $50 million small-business contract for a variety of information operations, information assurance and information warfare support services.The single-award task order contract would support both Defense Department and federal civilian agencies. The one-year contract has four one-year options, according to Federal Sources Inc., McLean, Va.The Health and Human Services Department will re-compete an $8.4 million small-business set-aside contract to establish and manage a data center that will support a branch of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, FSI said.The contract calls for a company to design and validate a data center and to ensure its compatibility with National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases systems. The company would supply software and furnish information security for the new systems.The contract will be re-competed during the 2007-2008 calendar year. No proposed location for the work is available, FSI said.After factoring in $12 billion in miscoding errors, said Democrats on the House Small Business Committee, just 21.6 percent of all federal prime contracts in fiscal 2005 went to small businesses.In Scorecard VII, a report prepared by the Democratic staff of the House Small Business Committee, Congressional leaders said the government failed to award its goal of 23 percent of $314 billion in fiscal 2005 federal prime contracts to small businesses, in part because contracts classified as going to small companies went to large businesses.The Small Business Administration recently announced that the federal government awarded small companies more than 25.3 percent of fiscal 2005 prime contracts.Democrats on the committee called on the General Accountability Office to investigate whether large companies were intentionally certifying themselves as small.The committee asked that the inspector general of each of the four poorest performing federal agencies: the Education, Transportation, Treasury and State departments, investigate whether their contracting officers had intentionally miscoded companies to meet their small-business contracting goals.