The administration resisted disclosing loan recipients until Friday, when the SBA and the Treasury Department announced plans to reveal the identities of borrowers with loans between $150,000 and $10 million, about 14 percent of the program participants. Administration officials had raised concerns about revealing proprietary and confidential information about borrowers, despite an SBA precedent of disclosing recipients in its other major loan program.
In a response letter included in the report, SBA said it produced more than 420 pages of documents to GAO in May and made senior officials available for three-and-a-half hours of interviews. “SBA cannot simply take a spreadsheet used on a public [Freedom of Information Act] website for traditional loan programs and populate it with PPP loan information,” the SBA said. “PPP loans implicate concerns about borrowers’ personal privacy and confidential, proprietary, or commercially sensitive business information.”
The SBA has announced that it will apply extra scrutiny to loans above $2 million but that was not enough for investigators.
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