'PPP program was awash in fraud. Now, one lender may finally face a legal reckoning'; I wrote 1.5 years ago, I want all MPs, MPPs, congresspeople, senators, bureaucrat & technocrats; who stole money?
'PPP program was awash in fraud. Now, one lender may finally face a legal reckoning'; I wrote 1.5 years ago, I want all MPs, MPPs, congresspeople, senators, bureaucrat & technocrats; who stole money?
We knew day one that government people will steal and embezzle this money, in Canada and US, so don't only look at the common petty $5 thief, look at the big whigs in congress and senate and commons!
just like Ukraine. it's their money laundering slush fund piggy bank...go check surnames of people on Ukraine contracts...see if any resemble people in our government.
Thanks for linking an excellent article. In all, PPP was a very good thing and kept many hundreds of thousands of small business employees employed and off the unemployment rolls.
As for the fraud, there is a partisan component. There are partisan interests that wanted fiasco and scandal, and to weaponize same for the 2020 election cycle.
As for the point of the article, the evidence and convictions from fraudulent PPP filings leads to evidence of negligent loan processing and eventual prosecution for maladministration. What is interesting in the article is the poor forgiveness rate of the Kabbage PPP loans. To some extent this may involve a form of predatory loan portfolio fraud; to inflate the value of the company stock by keeping unforgiven loans on the books that should have been forgiven.
Ironically, PPP loans made that cannot be forgiven under the very clear and reasonable rules of the program also represent loans that should have never been granted, as the intent and program structure was to forgive all legitimate PPP loans -- essentially, PPP was an emergency national grant program to underwrite the preservation of established employee salaries on behalf of their households and the protection of the national unemployment insurance system, using the banking system to process the massive numbers of applications expected as quickly as possible.
Still, how could there not be some instances of negligence in the processing of such loan volume under unprecedented rules during an apparent state of emergency. How could there not be corrupting partisan influences with the 2020 election cycle at hand.
PPP was a very smart and financially efficient move that provided local economies immediate and material relief in a manner that directly helped millions of employees that would have otherwise been abandoned to the unemployment insurance and welfare roles at unprecedented cost and calamity to those systems.
Separating the maladministration from the misadministration is a difficult task and I, for one, am pleased to see things progress in that way. The wheels of justice grind slowly but grind they do.
No differently than the Jab narratives, the present PPP narrative is similarly riven with falsehoods and misapprehensions. In fact, I am rather convinced the institutional phenomena presenting therein share the modern culture of maladministration that infects most institutions today.
When human issues are hijacked for political narrative, that is the tell that heralds the lies and misrepresentations to follow. Maladministration also happens to the handling of facts and the monetization of media, especially when syndicate criminality and human suffering are being harvested for political and financial gain.
Most PPP funds went businesses and non profits who did not need it, to pay their employees. Another SBA Covid program that also did not target needy businesses was the EIDL. 30 year loans @ 3.75% with a 24 month payment deferral. Practically free money. Both PPP and EIDL were well intentioned but, so were the mRNA vaccines. Is it the law of “unintended consequences” or intentional financial chaos?
It will be interesting to how many small businesses survive the SBA noose, which is notoriously inflexible and may have killed more businesses than it saved over the years.
Intentional, or so it seems. It appears to some that "the word" went out through partisan insider channels that there would be no enforcement. Apparently the Democrat support for PPP was rooted in different motives; political motives that intended to use instances of fraud as campaign fodder in the 2020 elections. Politics aside, there were plenty of episodes of overt maladministration approving loan applications that were void on their face. They got big fees for processing the millions of applications.
No doubt we will also learn about crime rings that infiltrated the lenders and commit fraud in a manner similar to what occurred in the mortgage industry. These are sophisticated criminals; highly adaptive and bold.
Legitimate SBA lenders and Banks did a relatively good job administrating an ill conceived program. Unfortunately, PPP attracted many bad actors that put billions of taxpayer money in illegitimate hands.
We can agree to disagree. I see it in retrospect as a brilliantly conceived program that operated in a vast space faithful to its fundamental purpose with astonishing speed and effectiveness given the scope and scale of the ambitions. The financial orthodoxy shuddered and quaked but the lenders did rather well. The criminals knew just where to go and how to play it. What causes me shudder and quake is to think of the catastrophes averted having otherwise being allowed to occur, and resulting in economic losses to the taxpayer and adversely impacted innocent orders of magnitude greater than the fraud which is always a certainty in any federal program. Taxpayers were on the hook either way. Unlike the usual federal program, the money went with immediacy to the employers and families who needed it most. The economic toll of that not happening with the scale and speed accomplished would have vastly exceeded the costs of the PPP fraud that occurred, and that is before factoring in the fraud that would also have occurred in the absence of a PPP-like emergency rescue program. There is no escaping the costs of fraud in large programs just as there is no escaping the costs of fraud in war. The measure is did you accomplish the good you intended to do in a manner consistent with the good you determined was good that must be done?
What did Dylan sing? “Steal a little and they throw you in jail, steal a lot and they make you a king“.
Or Woody Guthrie, I think: "One man robs you with a six gun. The other with a fountain pen."
Money laundering.
just like Ukraine. it's their money laundering slush fund piggy bank...go check surnames of people on Ukraine contracts...see if any resemble people in our government.
Thanks for linking an excellent article. In all, PPP was a very good thing and kept many hundreds of thousands of small business employees employed and off the unemployment rolls.
As for the fraud, there is a partisan component. There are partisan interests that wanted fiasco and scandal, and to weaponize same for the 2020 election cycle.
As for the point of the article, the evidence and convictions from fraudulent PPP filings leads to evidence of negligent loan processing and eventual prosecution for maladministration. What is interesting in the article is the poor forgiveness rate of the Kabbage PPP loans. To some extent this may involve a form of predatory loan portfolio fraud; to inflate the value of the company stock by keeping unforgiven loans on the books that should have been forgiven.
Ironically, PPP loans made that cannot be forgiven under the very clear and reasonable rules of the program also represent loans that should have never been granted, as the intent and program structure was to forgive all legitimate PPP loans -- essentially, PPP was an emergency national grant program to underwrite the preservation of established employee salaries on behalf of their households and the protection of the national unemployment insurance system, using the banking system to process the massive numbers of applications expected as quickly as possible.
Still, how could there not be some instances of negligence in the processing of such loan volume under unprecedented rules during an apparent state of emergency. How could there not be corrupting partisan influences with the 2020 election cycle at hand.
PPP was a very smart and financially efficient move that provided local economies immediate and material relief in a manner that directly helped millions of employees that would have otherwise been abandoned to the unemployment insurance and welfare roles at unprecedented cost and calamity to those systems.
Separating the maladministration from the misadministration is a difficult task and I, for one, am pleased to see things progress in that way. The wheels of justice grind slowly but grind they do.
No differently than the Jab narratives, the present PPP narrative is similarly riven with falsehoods and misapprehensions. In fact, I am rather convinced the institutional phenomena presenting therein share the modern culture of maladministration that infects most institutions today.
When human issues are hijacked for political narrative, that is the tell that heralds the lies and misrepresentations to follow. Maladministration also happens to the handling of facts and the monetization of media, especially when syndicate criminality and human suffering are being harvested for political and financial gain.
Were repayment terms linked in any way to how many employees got Covid shots?
Most PPP funds went businesses and non profits who did not need it, to pay their employees. Another SBA Covid program that also did not target needy businesses was the EIDL. 30 year loans @ 3.75% with a 24 month payment deferral. Practically free money. Both PPP and EIDL were well intentioned but, so were the mRNA vaccines. Is it the law of “unintended consequences” or intentional financial chaos?
It will be interesting to how many small businesses survive the SBA noose, which is notoriously inflexible and may have killed more businesses than it saved over the years.
Intentional, or so it seems. It appears to some that "the word" went out through partisan insider channels that there would be no enforcement. Apparently the Democrat support for PPP was rooted in different motives; political motives that intended to use instances of fraud as campaign fodder in the 2020 elections. Politics aside, there were plenty of episodes of overt maladministration approving loan applications that were void on their face. They got big fees for processing the millions of applications.
No doubt we will also learn about crime rings that infiltrated the lenders and commit fraud in a manner similar to what occurred in the mortgage industry. These are sophisticated criminals; highly adaptive and bold.
Legitimate SBA lenders and Banks did a relatively good job administrating an ill conceived program. Unfortunately, PPP attracted many bad actors that put billions of taxpayer money in illegitimate hands.
We can agree to disagree. I see it in retrospect as a brilliantly conceived program that operated in a vast space faithful to its fundamental purpose with astonishing speed and effectiveness given the scope and scale of the ambitions. The financial orthodoxy shuddered and quaked but the lenders did rather well. The criminals knew just where to go and how to play it. What causes me shudder and quake is to think of the catastrophes averted having otherwise being allowed to occur, and resulting in economic losses to the taxpayer and adversely impacted innocent orders of magnitude greater than the fraud which is always a certainty in any federal program. Taxpayers were on the hook either way. Unlike the usual federal program, the money went with immediacy to the employers and families who needed it most. The economic toll of that not happening with the scale and speed accomplished would have vastly exceeded the costs of the PPP fraud that occurred, and that is before factoring in the fraud that would also have occurred in the absence of a PPP-like emergency rescue program. There is no escaping the costs of fraud in large programs just as there is no escaping the costs of fraud in war. The measure is did you accomplish the good you intended to do in a manner consistent with the good you determined was good that must be done?
I think we’re basically on the same page.