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 have suddenly become 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.
Hellbound and Down 