SCOTTSDALE, Ariz.–One analyst is saying the veracity of PPP loan data recently released by the Small Business Administration is, to put it mildly,” questionable. Case in point: it includes a listing for the “owner” of a Catholic Church, and that’s not all.
As CUToday.info reported, Ron Shevlin of Cornerstone Advisors has assembled a detailed look at the PPP loan data beyond just lenders and amounts, including what is being spent to save each job (with one institution’s data indicating they lent more than $1 million per job saved).
As Shevlin noted in an analysis, which was published on Forbes.com, “If you’re interested in the distribution of loans by gender or race, forget about it. Of the 661,000 loan applicants, 86% didn’t specify their ethnicity and 71% didn’t state their gender. There are, however, some surprising entries among those that did enter their ethnic background.”
For example, wrote Shevlin, the American College of Cardiology Foundation is listed as an American Indian-owned organization, as is Jewell County Hospital in Mankato, Kan., and Bob Ross Buick of Centerville, Ohio (which is also female-owned).
St. Mary Catholic Church of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Joliet, Ill. is listed as being Asian-owned.
‘Dubious Ethnic Data’
“To put it mildly, the veracity of the PPP loan data set is questionable,” wrote Shevlin. “I’ve already mentioned the dubious ethnic data. Here’s another example: Wells Fargo issued more than 12,000 PPP loans—yet not one of them has a number of retained jobs associated with them. In fact, of the more than 661,000 loans in the data set, 7.4% of them (about 49,000) indicated zero jobs retained, while another 6.1% (~40,000) had no entry at all in the jobs retained field.”
Added Shevlin, “Wasn’t the whole purpose of the program “paycheck protection?”