The Small Business Administration, assessing the government's success in awarding contracts to small businesses, said Wednesday that $83.2 billion went to those companies in the last fiscal year, a record amount. And it said that the government was close to complying with a law requiring that nearly a quarter of federal contracts go to small businesses. But critics quickly responded that the figures failed to reflect the full picture of federal contracting. They argued that small businesses were still not getting their fair share of government contracts. Senator Olympia J. Snowe, Republican of Maine and the ranking minority member of the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, was among the critics.