BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY 



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Third, agencies have lacked interagency access to and exchange 

 of current information about recent awards that might help to 

 prevent or detect duplicate awards. At present, SBA maintains an 

 SBIR program database that it uses primarily to produce its annual 

 report to the Congress regarding the program. However, the 

 information has a "time lag" of about 9 months because it is first 

 processed by each agency and then forwarded to SBA. Individual 

 agencies maintain records of recent awards, but this information is 

 generally not available to other agencies. If an official in one 

 agency wants to obtain information from another agency about a 

 specific proposal or company, such information is available only 

 through personal contacts and conversations. 



Some program officials believe that the present methods may 

 not be adequate for detecting duplication when dealing with 20,000 

 proposals annually. Officials at NASA and SBA have led the initial 

 efforts to improve interagency access to and exchange of current 

 information. An SBA official told us that the new approach will 

 overcome the time lag regarding information on current awards and 

 help in avoiding duplicate funding. In general, however, efforts 

 to provide interagency access to current information were at an 

 early stage of planning at the time of our review. Minimal 

 documentation existed to describe the proposed approach. 



Nevertheless, officials in several agencies told us that, in 

 the context of the 20,000 or more proposals now being submitted 

 annually, the problem is limited to relatively few cases of fraud 

 while the instances of genuine confusion about what constitutes 

 duplication may be somewhat more frequent. However, they agreed 

 that the problem should be addressed and that recommendations would 

 be helpful in resolving it. 



Accordingly, our March 1995 report recommended that the 

 Administrator, SBA, take steps to (1) determine whether the 

 certification form that accompanies SBIR proposals needs to be 



