Changes in suspension and debarment data reported by the government can provide the American public with substantially more insight into the types of entities (and individuals) excluded through suspensions, proposed debarments, and debarments, including that the overwhelming majority of excluded companies are small businesses.  These changes likely show that more than 90 percent of the businesses excluded by the Department of Defense in Fiscal Year 2016 were small businesses. In this blog post we discuss the current counting method used by the government, and present a revised counting method using recently completed Fiscal Year 2016 exclusion statistics to understand the current state of the government’s suspension and debarment system in a more nuanced way.

Current Counting Method

The statistics reported by the Interagency Suspension and Debarment Committee (ISDC) in the annual ISDC Report cover only total numbers of suspensions, total proposed debarments, and total debarments.  This presentation could easily confuse readers because the aggregated data conceivably “triple counts” exclusions in a given year.  For example, a single individual or company may be suspended, proposed for debarment, and debarred in a given year and the ISDC Report would count that as three (3) separate actions.
Continue Reading State of Suspension/Debarment: FY2016 Statistics and the Impact on Small Businesses