On December 5, 2025, the Small Business Administration (SBA) sent letters to 4,300 current and recent participants in the 8(a) Business Development Program requiring production by January 5, 2026, of financial records, contracting and subcontracting agreements, and employee records. Below we discuss the genesis of the U.S. Government’s focus on fraud in small business programs, the new SBA request for documents, the coming Treasury audit of preference-based contracts, and more.
Earlier this year, the Department of Justice (DOJ) entered into a settlement resolving allegations of fraud by former and current participants in SBA’s 8(a) business development program and a U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) contracting officer. As noted in the DOJ press release, $550 million in government contracts were fraudulently awarded through bribery of a USAID contracting officer.[i]
On June 27, 2025, SBA Administrator Kelly Loeffler announced an audit of the 8(a) program due to what SBA described as “rampant fraud—and increasingly egregious instances of abuse.”[ii] The SBA Administrator directed the SBA’s Office of General Contracting and Business Development to launch “a full-scale audit of the program to stop bad actors from making the kind of backroom deals that have already cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.”[iii] Per SBA’s press release, SBA...
An appellate court has shut the door on reviewing the constitutionality of the qui tam provisions of the False Claims Act (FCA), although two other appellate courts are reviewing this issue, with ...