We spoke with numerous bankers, economists and government officials under former President Donald Trump and President Biden - since the program spanned both administrations - to find out why loan forgiveness was so lenient, especially after the highly publicized misuse of the program. NPR dissected the decision-making behind the Paycheck Protection Program that led to it being widely seen as a massive government giveaway. An unknown additional number of loans went to companies that didn't need PPP funding to survive the pandemic.Īnd although the Justice Department and other federal agencies have up to 10 years to prosecute pandemic fraud, the SBA's inspector general has called that pursuit a "pay-and-chase" situation unlikely to recover much money. The SBA disputes those findings, but its own inspector general has estimated that at least 70,000 loans are potentially fraudulent. "The PPP program seems to have resulted in billions of dollars of fraudulent loans that have ultimately turned into grants," said Samuel Kruger, an assistant professor of finance at the University of Texas at Austin who co-authored a paper estimating that $64 billion of the nearly $800 billion in loans issued show signs of fraud, such as suspiciously high payrolls and multiple businesses listed at the same home address.
Investigations Virtually all PPP loans have been forgiven with limited scrutiny
0 kommentar(er)
