The Business Gateway to Your Government

Starting the Dialogue
Business Gateway is committed to supporting a more open and transparent dialogue between government and the public. Our recently launched Community is just one example of our commitment, but don’t overlook the other avenues we have implemented for conversation and collaboration. Through our Partners Program, we work with government agencies and industry partners to provide authoritative information that helps small business interact with the government. We also maintain and publish a list of federal points of contact, who serve as liaisons between agencies and small businesses, as called on by Small Business Paperwork Relief Act of 2002. These efforts have helped initiate a dialogue between business owners and organizations serving them, making the government more transparent and data more accessible the nation’s small business community.

The Community takes this dialogue one step further by allowing business owners to interact with the government and each other - providing a forum for small business owners to voice their ideas and needs. Though the Community was only launched a little over one month ago, we are heartened by the excitement that small business owners are expressing about the Community, as well as the type of questions they have. We hope the Community will extend the existing one-on-one interaction an agency would have through help desks, whether via a call center or over email, where the conversations end once the parties hang up or click send. With the Community, we can broadly distribute the information that one business owner might have received and increase the context, usefulness and quality as others community members add to the conversation.

Engaging Federal Partners
We are encouraging agencies that support and interact with the small business community to register and participate in the great conversations that are starting. We are busy scheduling individual demos to our partner agencies and discussing how they can get involved.

To date, we’ve met with representatives from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), Small Business Administration (SBA), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and Department of the Treasury, and will soon add the General Service Administration (GSA), Department of Transportation (DOT), and SBA’s Office of Veteran Business Development to the list.