The Case of the Missing Small Business Data

Suddenly, information about whether small businesses are actually small has gone missing from the Defense Department's Central Contractor Registry. Or so says the American Small Business League. At about 3 p.m. Pacific time Tuesday, employees of the organization were using the registry (specifically, "compiling information for an investigative report by a television network," they say) when key data suddenly disappeared. In its place was the following message: "A firm's actual revenues and number of

employees are not releasable under the Freedom of Information Act." Interesting, especially since this story emerges at a time of a lot of angst over recent federal efforts to tighten up the process of certifying companies as small businesses for contracting purposes.