SBA’s Oversight of the Small Business Development Center Program

The Office of Inspector General (OIG) is issuing this audit report to determine whether SBA provided effective oversight of the SBDC program to ensure statutory, regulatory, and agency requirements were met.

We found that opportunities exist for program officials to enhance financial reporting. Specifically, SBA can establish reasonable timelines for providing biennial financial examination results and ensure SBDCs submit timely and accurate payment requests. We also identified opportunities for SBA to increase the accuracy and completeness of the data used to assess program outcomes and to better align spending with demonstrated performance results. In addition, we identified opportunities for SBA to enhance how services provided to clients in rural areas are tracked.

We made five recommendations for SBA to enhance and enforce financial oversight, mitigate risks related to program performance, and strengthen program integrity.

SBA management partially agreed with all five recommendations. We closed Recommendation 1 because management established, implemented, and improved timelines for issuing the financial examination reports. Management’s planned corrective actions are sufficient to resolve Recommendations 2 and 4. However, Recommendations 3 and 5 are unresolved, and we will seek resolution on these recommendations in accordance with our audit follow-up policy.