Fraud in the Paycheck Protection Program, which gave potentially forgivable loans to small businesses during the pandemic, was largely due to financial technology companies, according to a new report.
in a study they published last year. That amounts to $64 billion in potentially wasted taxpayer money. This week's congressional report appears to confirm those allegations of widespread fraud.reviewed about 83,000 pages of internal emails, messages and other documents from more than a dozen fintechs, and interviewed former employees, executives and lending partners.
Blueacorn's loan reviewers were told"the faster the better" by managers who recommended spending no more than 30 seconds on each application. Internal documents encouraged Blueacorn workers to only flag applications with"extremely obvious fraud" because the Small Business Administration, or SBA,"would handle any fraud we didn't stop.", the SBA was hardly an effective backstop for fraud.
"The risk here is not ours – it is SBA's risk," a manager at Kabbage told his fraud specialists, according to the report. Investigators say this comment refers tothat it wouldn't pursue penalties against lenders whose borrowers had attested that their loan documents were accurate. "We didn't spend a lot of time on the front end to try to understand what [Blueacorn was] doing to prevent or eliminate any fraud," Prestamos' CEO told the subcommittee.
NPR reached out to five companies named prominently in the report. Two of them – Blueacorn and Womply, which investigators found were involved in about a third of all PPP loans funded in 2021 – did not respond. The other three – Bluevine, Celtic Bank and Kabbage – told NPR they cooperated with the committee's investigation and are proud of the work they did during an unprecedented situation.
Kabbage's spokesperson, Alison Miller, said her company adhered to PPP's rules in good faith and remains committed to borrowers.
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