Foreign Owned Subsidiary May Qualify as Small Business

February 10, 2017

SBA OHA: Foreign Subsidiary Was “Small Business”

Source: SmallGovCon, Matthew Schoonover, February 8, 2017

When many people think of small business federal contractors, they probably picture a local business and not a subsidiary of a foreign entity. But this image isn’t always accurate—small business federal contractors don’t often neatly fit in the mold of local, mom-and-pop shops.

The SBA’s small business regulations confirm this to be true. Indeed, to qualify as a small business for most federal contracting purposes, a company can be a subsidiary of a foreign firm—so long as certain criteria are met. This point was recently affirmed by the SBA Office of Hearings and Appeals, when it found that a domestic affiliate of an international conglomerate qualified as a small business.

In Size Appeal of Global Summit, Inc., SBA No. SIZ-5804 (2017), OHA considered an appeal of a size determination that found LORENZ International to be an eligible small business under an FDA procurement for software maintenance and support services. Among the issues considered was LORENZ’s eligibility as a supposedly-foreign company.

LORENZ is the American subsidiary of LORENZ Archiv, a German company that also owns subsidiaries in Germany, Canada, India, and the United Kingdom. According to the protester (Global Summit, Inc.), because most of the business conducted by this family of companies occurred outside of the United States, LORENZ was not an eligible small business under SBA’s regulations. READ MORE….

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