SBA Gets Report Card on ARRA Implementation
Apr 20th, 2009 | By Dawn R. Rivers | Category: ResearchThere were a total of eight administrative tasks required of the Small Business Administration by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), that were supposed to help small businesses regain access to capital, as well as some specific deadlines for the agency to have relevant regulations in place. And the statute mandates that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) report to the Senate and House Committees on Small Business on how the SBA is doing with all that and whether or not any of it seems to be working.
In this initial report, the GAO focuses on only half of those administrative tasks: (a) temporarily reducing or eliminating some loan fees; (b) temporarily increasing guarantee amounts up to 90%; (c) extending existing 504 loan guarantees; and (d) making loans to “systemically important” broker-dealers that operate in the 7(a) secondary market. As might have been expected, the SBA has gotten the easy stuff done already and plans to have the less-easy stuff in place soon. And, since two of the four administrative chores under the GAO microscope have not yet been implemented, it is difficult to assess the degree to which what the SBA has managed to get done has been effective at all.
