A weekly allowance or a lemonade stand are great ways to teach young kids how to manage their money. A loan from the Small Business Administration is not.
Yet according to the Department of Government Efficiency, the SBA issued 5,593 loans in 2020 and 2021 worth $312 million to businesses whose listed owners were 11 years old or younger. Either America’s children suddenly became expert entrepreneurs or, more likely, another round of fraud from the Covid-19 pandemic has been uncovered.
DOGE also claimed that the SBA gave 3,095 loans worth $333 million to borrowers who were listed as 115 years or older, bringing the total age-related fraud to $645 million.
An SBA spokesperson confirmed to the fact-checking site Snopes that “According to our preliminary analysis, SBA can confirm that over 5,500 loans, totaling about $312M, were distributed to businesses whose only listed owner was 11 years old or younger at the time of the disbursement.”
The White House did not offer additional context to Snopes or FOX News, and it’s unclear how the loans were actually used. Isabel Casillas Guzman, the SBA administrator at the time when the loans were paid, also did not return Snopes’ request for comment.
Snopes noted that it’s possible the loans were paid to adult borrowers, but the recipients appear as children in the government database because of poor recordkeeping.
Either way, the mistake is serious. The Pandemic Response Accountability Committee recently claimed that at least $79 billion of fraud during the pandemic was “readily preventable,” but government officials were not verifying Social Security numbers before paying out loans.
Though DOGE provided taxpayers with a great service by announcing the potential fraud publicly, full transparency would require the government to release records showing the loans so DOGE’s claims can be independently verified.
That’s a common theme with DOGE’s efforts to fight government waste. After DOGE announced it had cancelled 7 million active Social Security numbers for people 120 years or older, OpenTheBooks filed a Freedom of Information Act request for a list of Social Security disbursements by age group. The Social Security Administration claimed that no records exist.
OpenTheBooks also analyzed every program canceled by DOGE as of May 27 and found that the average person can only verify the dollar figures for 42% of the contracts and 27% of the grants. That doesn’t necessarily mean DOGE’s dollar figures are mistaken, but it means that public sites like USAspending.gov that record government spending data are insufficient for full transparency because they do not update in real time.
Whether or not 11-year-olds actually received loans from the SBA, it’s clear that government recordkeeping and fraud prevention measures need a serious overhaul.
(The #WasteOfTheDay is from forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com via RealClearWire.)
