The Small Business Administration (SBA) has referred 562,000 loans suspected to be fraudulent to the Treasury Department for collection, the agency said in an April 24 statement.
The borrowers of these loans “are tied to $22.2 billion in delinquent Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and COVID Economic Injury Disaster (EIDL) loans,” the SBA said.
PPP was a COVID-19-era loan program that helped businesses retain employees during the pandemic. EIDL was another pandemic program that provided loans and advances to businesses to help them recover from the crisis’s negative impacts.
The SBA had approved around $1.2 trillion in PPP and EDIL loans during 2020–2021, out of which at least $200 billion is estimated to be fraudulent, according to the agency….