The uncertainty surrounding the 51 million figure was fueled by a discrepancy between the information the SBA asked lenders to gather from borrowers and the information it asked those same lenders to enter into its loan processing portal.
The SBA asked lenders only to gather each borrower’s number of employees, but when lenders subsequently processed the loan in the SBA portal, the agency also asked for the “number of jobs retained.” Lenders often put the number of employees into the portal’s “jobs retained” box, according to numerous people familiar with the process. Skewing the numbers in the other direction, some lenders left “jobs retained” blank or put in zero, the people said.
Both the SBA and Treasury made officials available to speak with Reuters about the PPP on condition that they not be named.
The senior Treasury official said the 51 million figure was not just a sum of the job totals at recipient companies; it was supported by economic modeling as well. However, he added, “we can’t with any kind of certainty say that all 51 million of those would have otherwise lost their job.”
Because the figure isn’t a count of jobs saved, the official added, “we’ve been careful to always use the word ‘jobs reported’ or ‘jobs supported’ by the program.”
The SBA official confirmed that, when borrowers filled out their applications, they supplied “just the number of employees. It wasn’t jobs retained.”
Also on Aug. 21, the Small Business Administration reissued the full PPP dataset, fixing some of the problems that appeared when it was first made public in July. But the data still had holes. About 84,850 loans for amounts at $150,000 or above, had a zero in the jobs reported column, or the column was left blank. That problem applied to about 13% of loans at that amount.
The administration will have to wait until businesses apply for loan forgiveness to get a solid estimate of how many jobs were saved, economists and officials said.