AICPA testifies on small business size standards.

The AICPA asked a House of Representatives Small Business subcommittee to urge the U.S. Small Business Administration to increase its small business size standards for small business accounting firms to $25.5 million from the current $8.5 million. The SBA has proposed increasing the size standard to $14 million.

Odysseus Lanier, testifying on behalf of the AICPA, said, "To fully capture the small business accounting firms that have the resources to invest in the necessary infrastructure and properly perform services as required by federal government contracts reserved for just small business contractors, ...the size limit standard would need to be raised to $25.5 million."

The SBA's size standards define whether a business is small and thus eligible for government programs and preferences reserved for small business concerns. To determine eligibility for federal government small business programs, SBA establishes small business size definitions (referred to as size standards) for most private sector industries in the United States. The SBA's existing size standards use two primary measures of business size - receipts and number of employees.

Lanier said the AICPA recalculated the SBA's proposed $14 million size standard using data compiled from surveys of CPA firms conducted by Accounting Today and its own leading benchmarking survey for CPA firms (the PCPS/TSCPA National Management of an Accounting Practice Survey). (PCPS played the key role in providing the information for the recalculation.) The recalculation confirmed that, at a minimum, the proposed size standards would increase to the intermediate level of $19 million, he said. Furthermore, he said the AICPA believes the standard should be...