GSA appoints new acquisition chief

A senior official with the Small Business Administration has been tapped for the top acquisition policy job at the General Services Administration.

Emily Murphy, who serves as the senior adviser in SBA's Office of Government Contracting and Business Development, on Monday accepted GSA Administrator Stephen Perry's appointment to the position of chief acquisition officer, according to a GSA acquisition official.

Murphy has served as SBA's alternate to the Chief Acquisition Officers Council, the official body of procurement executives that serves as a forum for monitoring the federal acquisition system. SBA exerts significant influence over acquisition policies toward small businesses. Murphy has served as a spokeswoman for the Bush administration's efforts to drive more government contracts to those companies. "President Bush has made a commitment to America's small business owners," she said last year when announcing that the federal government had awarded $65.5 billion in prime contracts to small businesses in fiscal 2003.

But critics have questioned the accuracy of small business contracting data, as well as claims that the companies really are getting the share the government claims. A study by the Center for Public Integrity in Washington found that, in the past six years, more than $47 billion in Defense Department contracts meant for small businesses have gone to large companies.

"We can't monitor each and every contract," Murphy said in an interview with Fortune magazine last year. The article cited big business lobbying efforts and bureaucratic loopholes as reasons why large Defense contractors can sometimes classify themselves as small business. "Changes do need to be made, but the regulatory process can take six months to a couple of years," she said.

SBA tried to improve the accuracy of data collected for the fiscal 2003 contracting report, Murphy said. "We went out to the agencies and emphasized [the need for] a very careful scrub of their data," she said in an interview with Set-Aside Alert, a government contract information service for small and minority- and women-owned businesses.

The position of chief acquisition officer at GSA was created in June as part of the agency's "Get it Right" program, an effort to train employees on proper contracting procedures in the wake of procurement abuses by one of GSA's divisions, the Federal Technology Service. The position was held most recently by GSA's former chief of staff, Karl Reichelt, who served in an acting capacity.

GSA hadn't issued an official announcement of Murphy's appointment at the time of publication. Murphy couldn't be reached for comment.

-- Kimberly Palmer contributed to this report.