Small business stimulus loans - Who actually got 'em?

Today Crosscurrents is airing a story I reported about a stimulus lending program to help small business, but one thing is noticeably absent in the story—a business owner.  Well, there are two main reasons for this.  First, like the story notes, very few business owners in California (just a little over 100) have received loans through the America’s Recovery Capital program.  So there are just very few people who are in the program. 

But also, the Small Business Administration, which runs the ARC loan program, wouldn’t give me the names of the loan recipients for this particular program, even though the names of businesses with loans in other SBA programs are public information.  I also searched the USASpending.gov, the government’s website that tracks government spending including SBA loans, and it lists the names of recipients from the other programs as well, just not the ARC loan program.

Michael Elkin, the SBA’s Assistant District Director for Northern California, explained the rationale behind this.  He said that since the ARC loans are specifically for businesses facing financial hardship, naming the recipients directly reveals that a business is in trouble.  Competitors or clients could use this information to their advantage, Elkin said.

I did manage to locate one business owner in the Bay Area who got an ARC loan, but like Elkin predicted, the owner would not speak on the record because he didn’t want people to know his shop was having trouble.

Since the SBA expects 60 percent of ARC loans to default, according to the Washington Post, and the government is completely on the hook for all of the unpaid loans, the public may never know which businesses we’re spending millions of dollars bailing out.