Last week, the Midland Daily News, and other media outlets across the nation, received a dataset from the U.S. Small Business Administration. It displayed businesses who applied for a Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan. After the numbers were published by newspapers, the data provided by the federal government began showing inaccuracies.
The PPP is the centerpiece of the 2.2 trillion relief package enacted in March and is supposed to finance over five million small businesses.
The numbers are supposed to represent the range of money each business received and how many jobs were retained.
Bloomberg News reports the data is “riddled with anomalies.”
“Although the maximum PPP loan for a one-person enterprise is $20,833, more than 75,000 loans listing one job retained have higher amounts — including 154 showing $1 million or more,”the Bloomberg story reports. “The PPP was designed to keep employees of small businesses on payroll during the pandemic. Out of almost 4.9 million loans, the number of 'jobs retained' is zero for 554,146 and blank for 324,122. Seven loans list negative job numbers.”
Tim Osentoski of Osentoski Farm Equipment says his local paper, The Huron Daily Tribune reported the numbers. The data said zero jobs were retained at his Bad Axe location… in reality Osentoski says 16 jobs were retained.
“I think there was seven of us in Huron County that said zero jobs retained and I’m sure those seven businesses -- we’ve all retained our employees,” Osentoski said
In some ways, the data provided to newspapers was flawed from the beginning.
The data only shows the largest recipients of the loans -- meaning roughly two-thirds of businesses received less than $50,000 and are still not accounted for. Only those who applied for $150,000 or more showed up in the dataset.
The loan had a rocky start when first infusion of $349 billion ran out in just two weeks. Some small businesses couldn’t navigate the application while larger companies received loans maxing out at $10 million each, causing a public backlash and leading dozens of companies to return the money.
Congress added $310 billion to the program, but about $140 billion was unclaimed as the application deadline closed June 30. To compensate, congress extended the application deadline to August 8.
View the entire PPP disbursement in Michigan dataset below.
More information about PPP loans can be found at www.sba.gov.
