SBA Admin. Loeffler: ‘We Are Suspending Funding to the State of Minnesota’

EXCERPT:

LOEFFLER: "Well, that is right. Good morning, Cheryl. We are suspending funding to the state of Minnesota. I wrote a letter to Governor Tim Walz last week and said that we would be withholding millions of dollars from the state because there are simply no guardrails on taxpayer dollars. But the bigger picture is here, as soon as we found out following Thanksgiving weekend that there was massive fraud in Minnesota, we immediately went to look at pandemic era programs which we know were rife with fraud. So we went and investigated, only took a couple days to find about $3 million in fraud from the indicted individuals that were listed, about 80 individuals, so we dug further, we picked up about 13,000 loans that were flagged from fraud. And as you mentioned, about 7,000 individuals in Minnesota now know that they will not be able to ever get loans from the SBA for disaster recovery funds because they have defrauded the federal government and our taxpayers are holding them accountable, and we will be sending those files over to federal law enforcement because this isn’t just action to stop them from getting SBA support, but to make sure that there are consequences for them there, that there are prosecutions and there's accountability."