Tag: u.s small business administration

Hurricane Irma, a Category 5 storm, caused more than 130 deaths in the Caribbean and the U.S. and more than $77 billion in damages.

Rubio, who chairs the U.S. Senate Small Business Committee, weighed in after the SBA Inspector General (IG) released “Management Alert: Report 20-16, Serious Concerns of Potential Fraud in EIDL Program Pertaining to the Response to COVID-19." The alert went to the SBA and Congress “warning of suspected fraudulent activity in the COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) program.”

Rubio noted on Friday that they “unemployment rate unexpectedly dropped to 13.3 percent, well below the expected 20 percent” as “forecasters initially expected 7.5 million job losses in May, but 2.5 million were added — the greatest number of jobs created in a single month ever recorded.”

As Chairman and Ranking Member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, and as two of the principal authors of the small business provisions in the CARES Act, we are writing to express our views on a number of implementation and oversight concerns with the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) and Emergency Grant programs.

On Wednesday, U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., the chairman of the U.S. Senate Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee, convened a hearing titled, “Perspectives from Main Street: COVID-19’s Impact on Small Business.”

This week, U.S. Rep. Al Lawson, D-Fla., and U.S. Rep. Neal Dunn, R-Fla., wrote U.S. Treasury Sec. Steven Mnuchin and SBA Administrator Jovita Carranza, urging them in include Lake City’s HAECO Airframe Services, LLC under the PPP.

The CARES Act required that a borrower must certify in good faith that they have been harmed by the coronavirus pandemic and do not have access to other liquidity. SBA has issued guidance that businesses who cannot certify in good faith must return their PPP loan by May 14, 2020.