‘Taxpayers deserve to know how their money is being spent’: Demands for PPP transparency heat up

Jovita Carranza, administrator of the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA), testifies at a Senate Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee hearing on June 10, 2020, in Washington, D.C. The committee is examining the implementation of the CARES Act, which has handed out billions of dollars of government-backed forgivable loans to small-business owners that keep employees on their payroll.WIRE PHOTO: AL-DRAGO-POOL—GETTY IMAGES

Nearly from the outset, transparency has been a major concern for the $670 billion Paycheck Protection Program. And now government agencies, members of Congress, and watchdogs are pushing the Small Business Administration and Treasury to name the nearly 4.6 million PPP loan borrowers.

After just 13 days, funds for the first round of the program (then, some $350 billion) ran out, and the public later came to find out that many of the loans went to large, publicly traded companies and chains. Although Congress has since taken many steps to amend the program—from new rules of who was eligible to receive loans to directing funds to smaller businesses in rural areas—a big question still hasn’t been answered: Who exactly got the loans?