GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Document Type

Testimony

Publication Date

2025

Status

Working

Abstract

This testimony analyzes the 2025 Small Business Administration "audit" of the 8(a) Program within the broader federal procurement integrity framework, emphasizing that oversight is delivered through multiple, overlapping institutions and tools rather than a single, fraud-enforcement process. It explains how independent Inspectors General, GAO, DOJ enforcement, bid protests and eligibility challenges, and disclosure and whistleblower mechanisms operate in parallel, each with distinct evidentiary thresholds, procedural protections, and remedies. It notes that oversight discourse frequently blurs critical distinctions among fraud, improper payments, ineligibility, documentation deficiencies, waste, abuse, and mismanagement. Those categories are not interchangeable: “fraud” is a legal conclusion that typically requires adjudicative determination, while many integrity problems reflect non-fraud control failures, administrative error, or weak monitoring. The testimony also places these classification problems in a broader environment of weakened oversight capacity and contested independence for key watchdog institutions. It notes the practical compliance constraints facing small businesses, warning that rapid, standardized documentation demands can end up measuring administrative capacity as much as misconduct. It closes by urging Congress to focus on implementing outstanding GAO recommendations on certification controls and monitoring and to require transparent classification standards before using audit outputs to support sweeping fraud claims.

GW Paper Series

2026-03

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