The Small Business Administration appears to have made significant headway streamlining its process for Paycheck Protection Program loan forgiveness, which drew complaints through last year and early 2021, American Banker reported. Previously, the process worked best for large PPP lenders with the resources to create in-house portals. However, as many as 1,500 small lenders had made little or no investment in a technology platform to support forgiveness, the SBA estimates. For them, loan forgiveness risked becoming “a national paperwork exercise,” that a new SBA portal, launched Aug. 4, aimed to resolve, Patrick Kelley, the SBA’s associate administrator for the Office of Capital Access, said in an interview. In just two weeks, the direct borrower forgiveness portal has received more than 340,000 submissions, and about half of those have already been fully forgiven and paid out, Kelley said.
