Breaching the "ramparts of secrecy"
The Associated Press provides additional details on administration efforts to "build ramparts of secrecy" around the Paycheck Protection Program.
PPP was originally intended to provide financial relief to small businesses during the current economic crisis. But evidence of wide spread abuse soon emerged.
In response to requests for pertinent data, the administration balked.
"Mov[ing] from early claims of delay by the Small Business Administration [, which maintained that it was too consumed by the urgent effort of helping small businesses through the economic downturn to provide the data, but offered assurances that] specific loan data may be released 'in the near future,'" the administration has now issued an outright denial, "refusing to disclose the recipients of taxpayer-funded loans."
The administration's "ex post facto" defense? The loan data is proprietary and, in some cases, confidential.
But the AP makes clear that applicants for the Paycheck Protection Program were notified that "under the Freedom of Information Act and with certain exceptions, the SBA 'must supply information reflected in agency files and records to a person requesting it.'"
No assurances of confidentiality were offered, a condition for legally defensible invocation of Kentucky's exception for confidential or proprietary records submitted by a private entity to a state agency but apparently not required under federal law.
https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/law/statutes/statute.aspx?id=48230 (see KRS 61.878(1)(c)1. and 2.)
While Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin "promised in his testimony to give the [Government Accounting Office] access to the loan data," South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn is dissatisfied.
Clyburn, who heads a House subcommittee overseeing the Trump administration's coronavirus response, argues, "American taxpayers deserve to know if their money is being used to help struggling small businesses, as Congress intended, or instead is being siphoned off through waste, fraud and abuse."
Well said.
The public must be afforded the same opportunity to breach the "ramparts of secrecy" and verify that the nearly $600 billion-plus appropriated for the coronavirus aid program for small businesses reached its intended recipients.
