Find Out Who Got a PPP Loan With ProPublica’s New Tool
Are you curious to know if your employer or local businesses received part of a $ 2.2 trillion government stimulus package? This week, ProPublica, an independent, non-profit news service, released a new Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) tracking tool .
This tool includes recently released Small Business Administration (SBA) data that includes lender-approved loans of $ 150,000 or more. ProPublica offers four ways to analyze PPP loan data. You can search by organization, lender, zip code, or type of business.
The PPP is part of the CARES Act passed in response to the coronavirus pandemic. PPP provided $ 659 billion to provide low-interest loans to small businesses. PPP loans can be forgiven depending on how companies use the money to keep employees on pay.
The first round of PPP funding ended by mid-April , sparking public outrage over which companies were approved. And the complaints only continued as new stories emerged of large companies receiving money through PPPs, such as large chain restaurants .
In May, ProPublica, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Bloomberg and Dow Jones sued the SBA for accessing data on PPP loans. The Trump administration has finally released the names of some of the companies that have received more than $ 150,000 in PPP loans. The SBA spent over $ 5.2 billion and saved 51.1 million jobs, according to the latest report .
If you are skeptical, you can now view some of the PPP loan data yourself. You can download the data for the US states and territories here . To access your local data, you first need to download the zip file. Then you can open your state’s .csv file and sort the data by postal code.
You can also search for data within seconds with ProPublica’s new tracking tool – the choice is yours.