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Advocacy Testifies Before House Veterans Affairs Committeeby Joe Sobota, Assistant Chief Counsel
Economic research has been one of Advocacy’s core missions since its inception, and a 1999 law directs the office to develop information about firms owned by veterans and by service¬disabled veterans and their role in our economy. This has proved difficult because nei¬ ther veteran nor disability status is identified in most routine business transactions (for example, bank loans). However, Advocacy contin¬ ues a long¬term research effort to develop information on veterans in business and related matters.
On April 29, Assistant Chief Counsel Joe Sobota testified before the House Veterans Affairs Com¬ mittee’s Subcommittee on Econom¬ ic Opportunity on the character¬ istics of veteran business owners. The latest U.S. Census Bureau data (2002) indicate that 14.5 percent of all business owners were veterans, and 7 percent of this group were service¬disabled. Census also found that 12.2 percent of all firms were veteran¬owned. If these percent¬ ages remained the same in 2009, this means that there were about 3.6 million veteran¬owned firms last year, of which perhaps 250,000 were owned by service¬disabled veterans.
Veteran¬owned firms mirror the greater business community in most respects, including their distribution by size, both in terms of revenue and number of employ¬ ees; their distribution by industry type; the percentage that were home¬based; their level of franchise ownership; the sources of capital used for business start¬up, acquisi¬ tion and expansion; the types of workers they used; and the types of their major customers. Veteran business owners were, however, much older than other owners and overwhelmingly male. These char¬ acteristics reflect the demographics of the underlying population of all veterans.
Advocacy commissioned a special tabulation of unpublished Census data to provide information on the location of veteran business owners by state. The top 10 states for veteran business owners were California, Texas, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, North Carolina, Georgia, and Mich¬ igan. Virginia and Washington State also appeared in the top 10 states for service¬ disabled owners.
Advocacy currently has two research projects on veteran¬related issues in progress, one examining factors affecting entrepreneurship among veterans and another look¬ ing at tax and regulatory problems facing veteran entrepreneurs. Advocacy’s April 29 is available at
www.sba.gov/advo/laws/testimon. html; visit www.sba.gov/advo/ research/veterans.html
for veterans research.
Source: The Small Business Advocate
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