Good afternoon.

Madame Chair, you and I first worked on creating additional tools for VA to meet and exceed the contracting goals for disabled veteran-owned small business in the 109th Congress.  The result of our efforts culminated in sections 502 and 503 of Public Law 109-461.  I believe it is fair to say the passage of that law was greeted very favorably by veteran small business owners. 

Unfortunately, VA has dragged its feet on properly implementing at least one very important provision of that law, and that is establishing a database of veteran and disabled veteran-owned small businesses whose status as a veteran-owned small business has been verified by the VA.  In other words, the only companies that should be viewed by someone searching the database are those which have been vetted by VA.  Unfortunately, that is not the case.

As you can see on the monitors, we have accessed VA’s Vendor Information Pages database of veteran-owned businesses.  Although the law clearly limits the businesses listed in the database to those whose veteran-owned status has been validated by VA, the monitor clearly shows businesses that have not been validated.

VA staff have pointed out that the little wreath logo notes a VA-certified veteran-owned small business.  I don’t know about you, but I do not view that as satisfactory to separate the verified from the unverified.  First of all there is no legend that defines the symbol as meaning the company has been verified.  For example, on the screen shown here, 7 of the 10 businesses listed have not been verified.  Additionally, it appears the database is also searchable for other set aside groups such as HUBZONE or 8(a).

The intent of creating the database was to provide VA contracting officers and other federal agencies seeking to contract with real veteran-owned businesses a source that could be trusted.  Whether a business self-certifies that it is veteran-owned, while VA is doing its homework on the business, it should not be listed.

Finally, as I said, Madame Chair, we started working on this in 2006 and it is now over three years since passage of Public Law 109-461.  It appears to me that just like everything else VA touches, it literally takes them years to comply with what Congress and the President has told them to do.  VA has presented Congress with four budgets since these provisions became law and to my knowledge, not one of those budgets requested any additional resources to comply with the law.

As a result, as GAO has reported extensively, companies falsely representing themselves as veteran and disabled veteran-owned have stolen millions of dollars in contracts from real veteran-owned small businesses.  I believe if VA had implemented the law expeditiously and in accordance with Congressional intent, those millions in taxpayer dollars would be in the coffers of real veteran-owned businesses.  And the icing on the cake is that some of the businesses identified as fraudulent are still doing business with VA despite the Secretary’s authority to debar them.  So what I want to hear from VA today is that they are going to get this mess cleaned up…. yesterday.

Finally Madam Chair, I ask unanimous consent to have a submission by the International Franchise Association made part of the record. 

I yield back.