Congresswoman Elaine Luria joined more than 100 of her House Democratic colleagues in calling on the SBA to more quickly and transparently process Economic Injury Disaster Loan grant applications and provide updates to small businesses who have applied for an EIDL.
“The Economic Injury Disaster Loan program is a vital resource for small businesses across Coastal Virginia,” Luria said. “It is unacceptable that many local businesses have yet to receive this necessary assistance and remain uncertain of the status of their application.”
The CARES Act, which Luria voted for, requires the SBA to provide grants up to $10,000 in the form of Economic Injury Disaster Loans. While Congress advocated for a maximum of three days to distribute these grants to applicants, many businesses have been waiting for nearly a month without any updates on the status of their grant application.
These delays are hurting critical small businesses in both Coastal Virginia and across the country.
Luria and her colleagues called for SBA to quickly address the following requests to improve implementation of this program and ensure relief to small businesses:
- Create an EIDL application queue to accept new applications and ensure that SBA and Congress will have a comprehensive understanding of the demand by small businesses for EIDL and can address any gaps.
- Provide EIDL applicants with an updated status of their application so that small businesses can better assess their financial future.
- Provide Congress with daily updates on EIDL processing in order to effectively exercise oversight over SBA’s processing of EIDL.
- Communicate with Congress on the steps SBA is taking to ensure back-end capacity in order to address ongoing issues regarding web-portal crashing, constituents waiting hours to connect with SBA customer services representatives, and recent news of the inadvertent exposure of personally identifiable information.
The letter can be found here.
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