Much to the relief of industry groups, the Small Business Administration July 1 withdrew its proposal to restructure the size standards that govern eligibility for federal small business procurements.  The proposed rule, issued for comment March 19, intended to simplify size standards by establishing number of employees as a common standard for all industries and reducing the number of individual size standard levels from 37 to 10 that are based either on monetary receipts or on number of employees.  Several industry groups raised concerns that the changes would have detrimental affects on small businesses making thousands of firms ineligible for small business set asides and asserted the current system is neither complex nor difficult to use and hence should not be changed.  SBA said it will continue to study opportunities to simplify size standards (Fed. Reg. 39,874).

{TAG_FORM_TITLE}