Feds to forgive coronavirus loans by next week

• The US Treasury Department and the Small Business Administration (SBA) will start accepting forgiveness requests for loans — almost two months after the applications for the $659 billion program ended.
• According to Politico reports, since the SBA began accepting them on August 10, not a single application from the 96,000 requests was acknowledged.
• The PPP loans were doled out by various business supporters to help the hardest-hit businesses survive the pandemic.

The feds will finally start forgiving loans within a week in a bid to help small businesses get through the coronavirus crisis.

In an email, a spokesperson for the Treasury told The Post that the US Treasury Department and the Small Business Administration (SBA) are scheduled this week or early next week to begin accepting applications for loan forgiveness under the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP).

This would mean the approvals will commence nearly two months after the applications for the $659 billion program on Aug. 8 ceased.

Politico reported this week that SBA authorities have received around 96,000 forgiveness requests since the agency started accepting them on August 10. However, not a single request had been approved or rejected.

So far, the submitted requests reportedly account for less than 2 percent out of the dispensed 5.2 million loans by the relief program.

Once officials start poring through the applications, approvals are anticipated to move except for PPP loans that exceed $2 million, which will first undergo an audit to determine if the borrowers followed the rules, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Although the PPP loans provided the much-needed relief for several businesses badly affected by the pandemic, reports said that business advocates and banks that appropriated the loans criticized the complex and slow process of absolving them.

“Unless we get something both from a legislative perspective and from Treasury and SBA to make this process a little easier, it’s going to be a struggle,” Bank Policy Institute associate general counsel, Naeha Prakash, told Politico.

Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has expressed support for a measure proposed by some lawmakers to allow all loans less than $150,000 to be cleared automatically.

Source: New York Post