Some of you have heard about a lawsuit against the SBA, filed by The Washington Post, New York Times, ProPublica, Dow Jones & Bloomberg in relation to the CARES Act. These newspapers are seeking a list of the borrowers who received SBA PPP and SBA EIDL loans.
SCORE is not involved in this situation, and we ask our volunteers to refrain from commenting to members of the media on this subject, out of respect for our federal grant.
On the SBA’s Freedom of Information page, (
www.sba.gov/foia) they issued the following statement:
“SBA is providing statistical information on the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans and Economic Injury Disaster Loans (EIDL) in an effort to keep the public informed of the assistance and actions both it and the thousands of lenders across the country are taking at this difficult time. At this time, the agency is focusing its efforts on assisting small businesses during this unprecedented disruption to the economy due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak. The agency recognizes the need to balance the interests of transparency with the privacy and confidentiality issues release of loan information raises. In the near future, we will be able to turn our efforts to providing loan-specific data to the public, but hope that all understand the need for the Agency to focus its efforts on fulfilling the urgent needs of small businesses.”