The Small Business Administration has teamed with American Express OPEN and Women Impacting Public Policy to launch a national initiative aimed at boosting government contracting opportunities for women-owned small businesses. Representatives of the three participating organizations unveiled the program, dubbed ChallengeHER, at a luncheon for women business owners in Washington this week.

ChallengeHER will help women business owners compete in the government contracting marketplace by providing  online curriculum and resources, mentoring with experienced women contractors, and access to government buyers and prime contractors. A series of 9 free events and workshops to take place around the country will kick off on May 23 with a Department of Energy event.

SBA Administrator Karen Mills said one of the agency’s top priorities is making sure that more qualified women-owned, veteran-owned, and minority-owned small businesses have access to government and commercial supply chain

On the White House’s list of “the top 10 things you need to know about President Obama’s 2014 budget” that was released yesterday, numbers 1, 2, and 3 are all designed to please small business. The White House says that the $3.78 trillion budget, proposed for the fiscal year starting in October:

• Ends tax breaks for companies who ship jobs overseas and rewards businesses that hire here at home;
• Creates jobs and builds the communications and transportation network that businesses need to succeed by fixing roads, bridges, and other infrastructure most in need of repair first; and,
• Gives small businesses a 10 percent tax credit to hire new workers or increase wages.

In fact, the President’s 179-page budget proposal invokes the term “small business” 93 times, including proposals to extend increased expensing for small business, eliminate capital gains taxation on investments in small business stock, double the amount of expensed start-up expenditures, and expand and simplify the tax credit

A key small-business friendly component of the Affordable Care Act won’t go into effect as soon as planned. The Act, passed in 2010, stipulated that Small Business Health Options Programs would establish group health insurance exchanges for small employers in each state. The so-called SHOPs would, beginning in January 2014, offer employees of those businesses a choice of coverage options.

The idea was to streamline the administrative process for small employers, enable groups of them to access the rates that large employers enjoy, and let employees shop around, presumably driving down costs by forcing greater competition among insurance providers.

But on March 11, the Health and Human Services Department proposed an amendment to the Affordable Care Act that delays by a year the offer of a choice of health insurance providers to employees:

“The effective date of the employer choice requirements ... and the premium aggregation requirements ... for both State-based SHOPs and FF-SHOPs will

Think the government is not crucial to fostering entrepreneurial success? Some experts would beg to differ.

A national American Express OPEN initiative that launched today in Milwaukee is based on the idea, conceived by renowned entrepreneurship thinker Daniel Isenberg, that public sector leaders, including government officials, are key to boosting the development of entrepreneurship ecosystems. Milwaukee is the first of several select U.S. urban areas where the new program, called OPEN for Enterprise: Coalitions for High-Growth Entrepreneurship, will attempt to channel government power to supporting entrepreneurship and existing businesses with great growth potential.

OPEN for Enterprise uses a model developed by Isenberg, professor of entrepreneurship practice at Babson College and founding executive director of the Babson Entrepreneurship Ecosystem Project, also known as BEEP. BEEP is dedicated to promoting high-growth entrepreneurship by “pioneering a new way of thinking and acting

Tax accountants advise against trying to take a deduction for your dog's wardrobe

Nobody knows better how to raise flags for an IRS audit than tax accountants. And boy do they have stories to tell. The online accounting software provider Xero surveyed its network of accounting partners to find out about the most ill-advised deductions small business owners have tried to take. They also asked accountants to point to deductions you might be missing out on.

Out-of-pocket expenses and auto expenses, including gas, parking, and tolls, are the number one and two most overlooked small business deductions, according to Xero's online survey of 400 US accountants, conducted last month by Zogby Analytics. Also on the list of deductions business owners are prone to miss out on: depreciation, office improvements, and new hires.

Among the strangest deductions accountants say they've seen small businesses try to take: family vacations, pets and pet food, deadbeat relatives, traffic tickets, spaghettios, a daughter's wedding, alcohol, clothes for the dog, and gambling losses.

Only one in ten small business owners file their taxes on their own, according to the IRS.

If you’re among the 10 percent of small business owners who do your own taxes, take heart as you pull your hair out getting your forms in order this month: A simpler tax code is another step closer, and provisions aimed at small business are included.

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI) this week released a third “discussion draft” of the Tax Reform Act of 2013. This version includes language aimed at creating a simpler and fairer tax code for small businesses.

“Every dollar spent on complying with an overly complex, burdensome and broken tax code is a dollar that cannot be used for investment, hiring, and higher wages for American workers,” according to Camp’s statement. Camp also issued a Fact Sheet offering several reasons the tax code needs to be simplified, including that “Today’s tax code contains almost four million words,” and, “On average, more than one new tax provision has been added to the tax code each day, with nearly 4,500 changes in the last

The sequester that went into effect on Friday will impose a nearly $60 million cut on the Small Business Administration, that, taken together with innovation-hindering cuts to education, science, and health budgets, will create an increasingly austere climate for small businesses, according to Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez, a New York representative and ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Small Business.

Velazquez and fellow Democrats on the committee issued a report today describing the “Impact of the Sequester on the SBA and Small Business.” SBA budget cuts will result in “reductions to small business services, loss of lending authority, reduced oversight of private-sector lending partners, and many other areas that help our nation’s small firms succeed,” according to their report.

Among specific cuts they report:

• $1.5 billion in SBA-guaranteed lending will be cut from the SBA’s $29.3 billion business lending program;
• More than $17 million of a $335 million business lending

Six weekends remain before Tax Day, and advice for business owners abounds.

Your first stop for getting clear about what exactly your tax obligations are and how to meet them, whether you’re a sole proprietor or independent contractor or a business with employees, should probably be the IRS Small Business and Self Employed Tax Center. There you can download the forms you will need and get help determining what taxes you need to pay.

Then you’ll want to move along to all the advice that will help you minimize your tax bill.

At the SCORE website, you can find out which common small business tax mistakes to avoid, such as tossing your receipts for purchases under $75. Or spend an hour in an online workshop to learn tax secrets to keep more of what you earn, presented by the president of the American Institute of Certified Tax Coaches, which also offers a plethora of tax advice articles and resources for business owners and free agents.

The National Association for the Self Employed has