SBA New EIDL Loan & Fraud Enforcement

If you committed fraud knowingly or not, enforcement is ongoing. Overstated employee counts, especially when it came to EIDL grants. And Kelly Lockler has been talking about this on her ex feed, the hardship accommodation plan. We put up this poll on YouTube. What is your loan status? 13% of you said the SBA is cracking down on a COVID EIDL loan fraud. There's a brand new report out from the SBA that all 4 million COVID EIDL loan borrowers should know about. I'll give you the quick recap of this 10 page report. The new enforcement actions and what you as a borrower should know. Plus SBA administrator Kelly Lockler and her team highlighted a range of new measures to stop fraud. So if you're borrowing going forward, here's what you should know. I'll give an update on the hardship accommodation plan if you are an existing SBA borrower and having a difficult time paying as always. Thanks so much for tuning in, subscribing to this channel so you never miss out on anything funding or business related. We've been covering the SBA for over five years now. We're the most trusted SBA channel here on YouTube. We thank you for that. And at any point, if you need help with the funding or small business growth, go to tryskip.com to create a free account. Check out your financing options, including SBA 7A loans, how to get approved from anywhere from $50,000 up to $5 million. We help you with that. There's still tons of funding out there for you despite the macro economy. Plus we list millions of dollars in grants and we're giving out over a million in direct grants this year. We've given out 29 grants in the past 30 days. You can take a look here and see the upcoming grants due and who's won recently. But more on that later, let me talk about this report sent from Sheldon Shoemaker, the Deputy Inspector General of the SBA to Kelly Loeffler on March 31st, titled White Paper on COVID-19 Pandemic, EIDL and PVP Loan Fraud Landscape. I cover a lot of these reports during the whole Biden administration. Every time the OIG issued a report, I would talk about it here. This is an update on all that, so Kelly Loeffler and her team understand the scope of the fraud and what's happened. In short, and this number is astonishing, the SBA Office of Inspector General investigated the $1.2 trillion that was dispersed through the COVID-era programs, EIDL and PPP, and found that over $200 billion may have been fraudulent. These loans were meant to help small businesses, but many were misused due to weak internal controls and, of course, bad actors taking advantage of those weak internal controls. The SBA Inspector General will continue to investigate fraud cases. Loans identified as fraudulent, even if you haven't been flagged yet, there's still potential for it to be flagged for the OIG and law enforcement investigation. If borrowers received funds they weren't eligible for, they may face collections, repayment demands, or legal actions. That's number one. Number two, on repayment and recovery, the SBA is actively reviewing certain loans, for example, loans to ineligible businesses, duplicate payments, improper sole proprietor claims, to determine if money should be recovered. Number three, foreign IP and fraud flags. Remember, this was a big case. Foreign IP addresses accessing the system, they automatically flagged most of those as potential fraud, so applications submitted from foreign IP addresses are under scrutiny. Approved loans from these may be reversed and subject to fraud referrals. Fourth, borrower compliance is under review. The SBA is reviewing thousands of loans for eligibility, including duplicate disbursements, missing EINs, overstated employee counts, especially when it came to EIDL grants, or improper loan forgiveness, particularly for the PPP program. And finally, five, business response opportunity. Businesses named in these reports have 30 days to respond and provide context or clarification before findings are finalized. So here's what borrowers should know on this report. But first, let me talk about this press release that just came out on the new measures to stop fraud that Kelly Loeffler and her team are doubling down on. Here are the key changes to combat fraud. And Kelly Loeffler has been talking about this on her ex feed, saying that under Biden, individuals could apply for an SBA loan without verifying their basic date of birth or confirming their citizenship. Last month, Doge uncovered more than 630 million in SBA loans distributed to, quote, borrowers over the age of 115 or under the age of 11. And again, I went through all of those forms myself when they were first released, and I saw a lot of the weaknesses in the form validation. I would chalk up a lot of that to just bad forms, something incredibly easy to do, date of birth validations. So the SBA has done these three changes. Citizenship verification, all SBA loan applications now include a citizenship verification provision to ensure only legal eligible applicants can access SBA programs. Date of birth verification, all SBA loan applications now include a process to verify the applicant age and date of birth. And third, automatic fraud alerts. SBA's date of birth verification process will automatically flag any applicant claiming to be younger than 18 or older than 115 years old. And it says under the last administration, lax guardrails allowed illegal aliens, children, and the deceased to apply for and receive approval for SBA assistance. Now this is broadly speaking, it's not just the COVID EIDL and PPP programs. This pertains to all of the SBA programs and what they're doing going forward, whether you're applying for 7A loans, 504 microloans. These are some of the measures put in place. So back to the final OIG report. But first, if you have an EIDL loan on the Skip dashboard, you'll see this new tab. For every COVID EIDL borrower, it's free. You can quickly put in your outstanding balance when your next payment is and payment amount and see your interest accrual on a daily basis. And also use the calculator to see how much you can save by adjusting payments. Very important if you are trying to manage your EIDL loan, you're having a tough time, you wanna figure out what you can do. What happens if you increase payments and pay off the loan earlier? How much do you save in the long run? What happens if you have to lower your payments? What does that do for your payoff date? Because as of now, the hardship accommodation plan is still over. For those of you in it, it won't be renewed. Those of you trying to request manually via the SBA email address, I hear from a lot of you, you're struggling to hear back or get approved for that. So just expect that all of that is gonna be more difficult, but I would love to hear in the comments, how are you doing with your COVID EIDL payment today? We put up this poll on YouTube three days ago, 230 votes so far. We asked, what is your loan status? 13% of you said you're comfortably making payments. 61% said you're struggling to make payments. 21% said you stopped making payments. Only 5% of you said you've paid off your COVID EIDL loan. So the majority of you are struggling or even stopped making payments. But here's what you should know when it comes to fraud. If you committed fraud knowingly or not, enforcement is ongoing. The SBA and OIG are continuing to close recommendations and refer cases for investigations or collections. Second, not all mistakes are fraud, but any improper payments, wrong amounts and eligible applicants may still need to be repaid. And third, if you suspect you were wrongly flagged or need to clarify your situation, you can respond to the SBA via the OIG email, aiga.sba.gov within 30 days of the report. As always, I'll keep you posted on anything we hear from the SBA when it comes to program changes, cracking down on existing loans or new programs that come up in the future. Don't forget to go check out the Skip Dashboard and see what's available to you. And of course, put in your EIDL loan information to get free help managing your SBA loan. Most importantly, stay well, stay healthy, and I'll see you in the next video.