Veteran Owned Small Businesses Shorted
Congress authorized the creation of a non-profit corporation (National Veterans Business Development Corp.) to help veterans start or grow small businesses–and provided $17 million taxpayer dollars to the corporation since 2001. Interestingly (but not surprisingly), only 15 percent of the funding has been spent on business resource centers that are supposed to provide business assistance services to veterans. This is what a recent report from the Senate Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee is telling us.
It gets better. The report found that the corporation wasted money on excessive compensation for executives, on expensive dinners for employees at high-priced restaurants in Washington, and on questionable charges on company-issued credit cards. The compensation for the top two executives in fiscal 2007 ate up 22 percent of the funding for that year–more than was spent on the business centers. Does any of this sound familiar?
Senators John Kerry, D-Mass., and Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, are now recommending that no more money go to the corporation. Instead, they want any future federal money, to assist veterans in small business, to go to the Small Business Administration’s Office of Veterans Business Development.
Unfortunately, this seems to be the way our government operates when they dabble in the private sector. I shudder to think what will happen if our government nationalizes our banking system.
Maybe our elected representatives would like (or not) to hear what we think about this waste of money, and how they need to better support small business–especially veteran-owned businesses–to get our economy back on track. What do you think?
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