As business owners, we are constantly looking at the numbers. The sales figures, the revenues, the cost of production, overhead and incidentals, and, of course, the profits. As midyear approaches, we begin to evaluate whether those numbers will meet our projections. But there are some other numbers that we, as minority and women business owners, need to track. The percentages.

I'm talking about the percentage goals for small, small disadvantaged, and woman-owned businesses. Those of you who have been around for 10 or 20 years know that those goals were, in large part, responsible for opportunities in contracting with government entities. We also know that there are organizations that have worked to reduce and even eliminate those requirements, but we felt secure that the government agencies were committed to our cause. However, that isn't always the case.

There is a key element of federal procurement, the Price Evaluation Adjustment (PEA), that was not renewed during the last legislative session. Under the 1994 legislation, offers submitted by qualified Small Disadvantaged Businesses (SDBs) were evaluated at their submitted prices, while the offering price from non-SDBs was adjusted by the PEA factor set for that solicitation. This evaluation adjustment provided SDBs with a mechanism to compete on equal footing against large, dominant companies that have economy of scale advantages in federal procurements. The statute for the PEA expired in December 2004.

The Small Business Administration (SBA) says it has increased the number of loans going to woman-owned businesses. But, according to the Senator John Kerry's office, the share of loans, both in number and dollar amount, going to that sector has actually decreased since 1998. Furthermore, the administration is preparing to eliminate 11 Women's Business Centers and has proposed cutting an additional 50 percent in 2006. And, of the $300 billion in contracts awarded by the federal government, woman-owned businesses are supposed to receive 5 percent; to date it has never exceeded 3 percent.

House Resolution 1268, the "Iraq/Afghanistan Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act for FY 2005," moved to the Senate where Section 6023 was added. This section would permit the Department of Energy (DoE) to count subcontract awards by its Management and Operations contractors and other large prime contractors towards DoE's overall small business prime contracting goal. Simply stated, this would allow the DoE to count its large businesses' subcontracts as if they were DoE direct small business contracts, essentially reducing the amount of small business direct contracting, and capping the total small business prime and subcontracting goals at 23 percent.

How do these things happen? In the case of the PEA, it was an oversight, but there is now a grassroots effort to try to reestablish the program. As to the support of the women's business centers, it was a budgetary adjustment. And Section 6023 was added to the resolution by Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM).

Fortunately, it's not too late to do something about the DoE issue. There was a huge outcry from the small business community, legislators who recognized the serious impact of such a provision, the Advocacy Office of the SBA, and even from the DoE's Office of Small Disadvantaged Business Utilization, all of whom decried such action.

In the final version that passed the House on Thursday, May 5, this provision was struck and replaced with a new provision (Subsection 6022), which, according to the House of Representatives Small Business Committee newsletter, "directs the DoE and the SBA to enter into a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) for reporting small business prime contracts and subcontracts at the Department of Energy."

The good news is that we have people who do care about the small business community. Without the efforts of Senator Kerry (D-MA), Tom Sullivan, head of the SBA Office of Advocacy, Small Business Administrator Hector Barreto, Senator Olympia Snowe (R-ME), Representative Nydia Velazquez (D-NY), Theresa Avillar-Speake, director of the Office of Economic Impact & Diversity for DoE, House Small Business Chairman Don Manzullo (R-IL), and many others, this might have slipped through without notice.

The lesson here is that we need to stay apprised of what's happening in Washington, in our state capitals, and in our own backyards.