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Almost 60 days of in-store closures in spring 2020 caused significant challenges for the Goodwill of Southern Nevada, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported. Retail operations accounted for about $28.2 million of the $32.4 million revenue in 2020, financial statements show. “At Goodwill, we rely primarily on those thrift stores,” CEO Rick Neal said. “Retail — shut that down, we feel it immediately and it’s like shutting off air.” Early closures caused Goodwill to lay off 322 employees, the majority of whom worked in retail, the nonprofit said. Those employees were offered right of first refusal upon the stores’ reopening, and about 86 percent returned. The organization received a $3.28 million loan through the Paycheck Protection Program, records show. But the shutdown forced Goodwill to turn its attention to things it had wanted to do for a long time, Neal said. It put more emphasis on its e-commerce auction site, with sales on Amazon and eBay, and moved career services that didn’t require face-to-face contact to the digital space. E-commerce revenue increased, from about $1.5 million in 2019 to nearly $2 million in 2020, last year’s financial statement shows.

Federal authorities announced yesterday that men from Massachusetts and New Hampshire have been charged in connection with their alleged roles in a scheme that used stolen identities to fraudulently obtain more than $450,000 in disaster loans from the Small Business Administration, the Associated Press reported. About $250,000 of that money was used to purchase iPhones that were then resold, according to a statement from the U.S. attorney’s office in Boston. Edwin Acevedo of Acton, Mass., and Hector Garcia of Manchester, N.H. were arrested last week and charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Garcia was also charged with aggravated identity theft. Acevedo is being held pending a detention hearing. Garcia is scheduled to make an initial court appearance on Sept. 3. Garcia used the stolen identity of a U.S. citizen to open a fraudulent bank account, which was linked to other fraudulent bank accounts set up to receive the loans, prosecutors alleged. Acevedo then distributed debit cards associated with those accounts to other alleged accomplices, which were used to launder the loans through the purchase of iPhones for resale, prosecutors said. Garcia also wired a portion of the funds to the Dominican Republic, according to authorities.

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.