The Shuttered Venue Grant Took 102 Days to Open, Four Hours to Close and 150 Days to Pay

The slow program is the one with the small fraud estimate. SBA's inspector general put potential fraud at 33 percent of COVID-EIDL dollars and 8 percent of PPP dollars.⁶ For the venue grant, SBA's own estimate is 0.33 percent.⁷ As of October 2024, the inspector general reported, SBA had identified $544 million in potential improper payments in the program and had sent one demand letter.⁸

Seven days for PPP, 102 for SVOG

Four pandemic programs, four gaps between the law and the first day of applications:

EIDL barely belongs on the list. The COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan was SBA's standing disaster-loan program, the one that follows hurricanes and floods, pointed at a pandemic; the machinery was already on.⁹

PPP was new, but new in a way that let SBA hand off the hard part. Banks, credit unions and fintechs took the application, made the decision and sent the money against a federal guarantee; SBA's job was to guarantee and reimburse. The lenders already had the borrowers, the cash and the origination software. The earliest approval date in SBA's loan file is April 3, 2020.⁵

SVOG had no banks. It was a direct federal grant, paid by SBA to the venue, with no intermediary and no existing relationship to ride on. An SBA regional communications director told Billboard in March 2021 that PPP loans had been handled by delegated bankers and that the venue program was a "different animal," the first time the agency had built a grant process for for-profit businesses.¹ The eligibility rules, the application, the portal, the review and the payment all had to be built, and SBA had to read each file itself and decide whether the lighting rig was real.

The law Congress wrote

The program began as the Save Our Stages Act. Senators John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, and Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, introduced S. 4258 on July 22, 2020, with $10 billion for live-venue operators; Representative Peter Welch of Vermont introduced the House companion, H.R. 7806, five days later.¹¹¹² Both were referred to committee. The text was folded into Section 324 of the Economic Aid to Hard-Hit Small Businesses, Nonprofits, and Venues Act, signed December 27, 2020, at $15 billion, with museums and motion-picture theaters added to the venues and talent representatives the bill had named.¹³¹⁴

The statute is precise about who qualifies. An eligible entity had to have been fully operational on February 29, 2020, and to show at least a 25 percent drop in gross earned revenue in a 2020 quarter against the same quarter of 2019. A grant was worth 45 percent of the entity's 2019 gross earned revenue, capped at $10 million. To prove it was a venue and not a business that wanted money, an applicant had to satisfy a checklist: a defined performance and audience space, "mixing equipment, a public address system, and a lighting rig," paid staff in at least two named roles (sound engineer, booker, promoter, stage manager, security personnel, box-office manager) and a paid ticket or cover charge at most performances.¹³

The law also built a queue. For the first 14 days of awards, SBA could fund only the entities with the largest revenue losses; for the next 14 days, those down 70 percent or more; the 25-percent applicants waited for both windows to close. At least $2 billion was reserved for entities with no more than 50 full-time employees.¹³

PPP or SVOG, until March 2021

Part of SVOG's design was a sentence about a different program. As enacted, Section 324 barred a venue that took a PPP loan on or after December 27, 2020, the day the law was signed, from receiving the grant.¹⁵¹⁴ That forced a bet. PPP money was available in a week, from the venue's bank. The grant was larger but did not yet exist: the portal would not open for months and nobody could say when. A venue that took a PPP loan to make payroll in January might be signing away a seven-figure grant in May. A venue that held out might run out of cash waiting for a program that had not been built.

The American Rescue Plan Act removed the bar on March 11, 2021, let entities take both and subtracted any PPP loan received on or after December 27, 2020 from the grant. It also added $1.25 billion "to carry out section 324," which is how $15 billion became $16.25 billion.¹⁴ The fix came 74 days into the wait, with four weeks still to go.

The same law created the Restaurant Revitalization Fund, a second new grant program for the same agency to build at the same time. Isabella Casillas Guzman was confirmed as SBA administrator on March 16, 2021, by a vote of 81 to 17.¹⁶ Twenty-three days later the portal opened.

Four hours on April 8

The day before the launch, SBA's inspector general issued a management alert on the "$16.25 billion grant program." Its concern was not the website. Under SBA's risk model, the alert said, most awards would be rated low risk and "disbursed as lump-sum advance payments with minimal reporting requirements and agency oversight."¹⁷ The portal opened the next day at noon Eastern.

Billboard's account, from venue operators trying to apply: the link was not available, then the site was not working, then the document upload failed. "Everyone is stuck on the first of four phases of the application," one owner said. At 1:38 p.m. SBA posted that it was experiencing a technical issue. Its statement to Billboard said that "after working with our vendors to address the issues as quickly as possible, the SBA determined at approximately 4:15 p.m. EST to shut down the portal to ensure fair and equal access once reopened since this is first come first serve."¹ No application had been successfully submitted.²

SBA said its vendors fixed the root cause, then that stress tests had found other problems. It announced a reopening for April 24 and reopened on April 26.²⁴ Within the first 24 hours it received 7,884 applications. The first award came a month later, on May 26.⁴

The system ran on Salesforce. Jason Mastrine, a talent manager and a vice president at an event-technology company who had hit the same problems that morning, told Billboard the platform choice "was a good one," that "the site never actually 'crashed'," and that "a series of cascading errors in the application process" made it appear the flow "didn't receive the testing it needed prior to being released to the public."¹ One SVOG system contract on USASpending is a call order to Navancio LLC for "Salesforce Software as a Service Systems Development," signed September 27, 2022, seventeen months after the shutdown, with $6,543,471.21 obligated.¹⁸ That December, Navancio's subcontractor CloudWave announced a five-year, $23 million SBA blanket purchase agreement to automate and expand SVOG's Salesforce environment for SBA's Office of Disaster Assistance.¹⁹

411 grants by June 14, then the refresh

By June 14, 2021, SBA had received 14,214 applications seeking $11.5 billion and had made 411 awards totaling $304.2 million.⁴ On June 15 the administrator received a letter signed by 55 senators urging immediate action on disbursement.⁴

What followed, SBA called a "program refresh." OIG later listed what it changed. SBA stopped using the portal to track each eligibility requirement and switched to a manual checklist. Staff were told to presume applicant assertions true unless a clear indication of fraud was present. Reviewers got "a strict 4-hour review time limit per application"; approvers, 30 minutes. SBA stopped obtaining IRS tax transcripts for awards under $500,000 and limited validation of matches against Treasury's Do Not Pay system, the list of applicants barred from federal funds for reasons such as delinquent federal debt.⁴

The venues got paid. SBA's award file shows $3.14 billion awarded in June 2021 and $7.67 billion in July, more than half the program in one month.³

From two samples, OIG questioned 47 awards totaling about $22.9 million as grants to ineligible applicants, "the result of these weakened controls."⁴ A separate OIG audit of award and payment practices, with 11,974 grants and $9.7 billion out the door as of September 20, 2021, found that none of its ten sampled awards carried documentation signed by an authorized official ($33.2 million in unauthorized commitments), that three had been awarded $2.6 million more than the amounts requested, and that 1,849 awards totaling $1.49 billion had budgets that did not reconcile to the award.²⁰

What slow bought

SBA's award file, as of July 5, 2022, lists 13,011 grants totaling $14,574,273,170: a median of $302,505, a mean of $1,120,150, and 280 awards at the $10 million cap, none above it.³ PPP moved $792.6 billion across 11.47 million loans.⁵ COVID-EIDL's loan book was 3,680,124 loans and $370.26 billion in USASpending's records; SBA counted about four million approvals worth nearly $390 billion.⁹ The Restaurant Revitalization Fund, SBA's other new direct grant of 2021, received 283,741 applications, funded 100,572 of about 250,738 eligible applicants, spent $28.6 billion and closed.¹⁰

Two fraud estimates, two sources

SBA's inspector general put potential fraud at more than $136 billion for COVID-EIDL, 33 percent of disbursed funds, and $64 billion for PPP, 8 percent: more than $200 billion, "at least 17 percent of all such funds."⁶ SBA's own 2023 report on program integrity estimated "a likely fraud rate of one-third of one percent (0.33%) for SVOG, and three-fourths of one percent (0.75%) for RRF."⁷

The 0.33 percent is the agency grading its own program. As of October 2024, SBA had identified $544 million in potential improper payments to recover; it had "sent only one demand letter in January 2024, paused sending additional demand letters, and had not referred any recipients to the Treasury."⁸ In July 2024, OIG had reported that SBA assigned 30 staff to review 2,162 of the 13,011 awards, had selected 155 for eligibility review, and had completed 165 reviews by February 5, 2024; at that pace, OIG estimated, the remaining reviews would finish in February 2043. OIG counted a further 1,818 high-risk awards worth $1.6 billion that it said warranted an eligibility review and had not had one.²¹

On $14,574,273,170, $544 million is 3.7 percent, eleven times SBA's 0.33 percent, though improper payments are a wider category than fraud. Add the $1.6 billion in high-risk awards that OIG said in 2024 still warranted review, and 14.7 percent of the program's dollars were flagged or awaiting review. EIDL's 33 percent is still more than twice that.

In December 2025 the inspector general reported that SBA had since sent letters asking ineligible recipients and misusers to return funds and had set up a recovery process; the report gives no recovered amount.²²

The denials produced their own tail. In MomoCon v. SBA and Sokol World Entertainment v. SBA, applicants challenged SVOG denials under the Administrative Procedure Act. In each case the district court found the denial arbitrary and capricious and remanded; SBA denied again on a fuller record and won on the merits, in MomoCon on December 22, 2023, and in Sokol on March 20, 2025.²³

The program that read every file before paying disbursed $14.6 billion to 13,011 recipients. As of September 30, 2024, 2,590 of those awards, worth $4.8 billion, were still open.⁸

Notes

1. Billboard, "Shuttered Venue Operators Grant portal shutdown coverage," April 2021 ("Just over four hours after the portal opened on Thursday (April 8), the Small Business Administration was forced to suspend the application process"; portal opened at 12 p.m. EST; SBA statement on the 4:15 p.m. shutdown; Jason Mastrine of Hatchery 17 and Patron Technology on Salesforce; SBA regional communications director Andrea Roebker in March 2021 on PPP's delegated bankers and the "different animal"). ↩₁ ↩₂ ↩₃ ↩₄
2. Journal of Accountancy, "Shuttered Venue Operators Grant portal begins accepting applications," April 26, 2021 (portal closed "before any applications had been successfully submitted"; vendors fixed the root cause; stress tests found further issues; reopened April 26). ↩₁ ↩₂ ↩₃
3. Calculated from SBA's SVOG award file, "Shuttered Venue Operators Grant awards, as of July 5, 2022" (original: https://data.sba.gov/sites/default/files/distribution/SBA-ODA-2022-09-001/awards-as-of-7-5-22.xlsx): 13,011 grantees; $14,574,273,170 awarded; median $302,505; mean $1,120,150; 280 awards at exactly $10,000,000 and none above; earliest award date May 26, 2021; $52.1 million awarded in May 2021, $3,143,374,008 in June and $7,671,838,336 in July (52.6 percent of the total); awards continue through June 22, 2022. ↩₁ ↩₂ ↩₃
4. SBA Office of Inspector General, "SBA's Internal Controls to Prevent Shuttered Venue Operators Grants to Ineligible Applicants," Report 24-02, October 25, 2023 (portal closed for two weeks in April 2021; reopening announced for April 24, delayed to April 26; 7,884 applications in the first 24 hours; first award May 26, 2021; 14,214 applications seeking $11.5 billion and 411 grants totaling $304.2 million by June 14, 2021; letter signed by 55 senators received June 15, 2021; June 2021 "program refresh"; manual checklist; presumption of truth absent a clear indication of fraud; 4-hour reviewer and 30-minute approver benchmarks; tax transcripts discontinued under $500,000; limited Do Not Pay validation; 47 awards totaling about $22.9 million questioned from two samples). ↩₁ ↩₂ ↩₃ ↩₄ ↩₅ ↩₆ ↩₇ ↩₈
5. SBA, "PPP loan-level FOIA data, September 30, 2024 release": 8,612,447 first-draw and 2,855,763 second-draw loans (11,468,210), $792.60 billion in current approved amounts, approval dates from April 3, 2020. The CARES Act was signed March 27, 2020. ↩₁ ↩₂ ↩₃ ↩₄
6. SBA Office of Inspector General, "COVID-19 Pandemic EIDL and PPP Loan Fraud Landscape," Report 23-09, June 27, 2023 (potential fraud of more than $136 billion in COVID-EIDL, 33 percent of disbursed funds, and $64 billion in PPP, 8 percent; over $200 billion combined, "at least 17 percent of all such funds"); landing page: SBA OIG Report 23-09 landing page. ↩₁ ↩₂
7. SBA, "Protecting the Integrity of the Pandemic Relief Emergency Programs," June 27, 2023 (original: https://www.sba.gov/article/2023/06/27/us-small-business-administration-releases-report-anti-fraud-control-measures-pandemic-relief): "SBA estimates a likely fraud rate of one-third of one percent (0.33%) for SVOG, and three-fourths of one percent (0.75%) for RRF." ↩₁ ↩₂
8. SBA Office of Inspector General, "SBA's Oversight of Shuttered Venue Operators Grant Recipients," Report 25-21, July 22, 2025 ($14.6 billion disbursed to 13,011 awardees as of July 2022; $544 million in potential improper payments identified as of October 2024; one demand letter, January 2024; no Treasury referrals as of March 2025; 2,590 awards valued at $4.8 billion open as of September 30, 2024). ↩₁ ↩₂ ↩₃
9. SBA, "Four Million Hard-Hit Businesses Approved for Nearly $390 Billion in COVID Economic Injury Disaster Loans," June 13, 2022 (original: https://www.sba.gov/article/2022/jun/13/four-million-hard-hit-businesses-approved-nearly-390-billion-covid-economic-injury-disaster-loans); "COVID EIDL awards from USASpending" (3,680,124 direct-loan records, $370.26 billion); Congressional Research Service, "SBA COVID-19 EIDL Financial Relief," R47509 (COVID-EIDL ran on SBA's standing Economic Injury Disaster Loan authority; 3.75 percent for businesses, terms up to 30 years). SBA's $390 billion is an approval-basis count; USASpending's $370.26 billion is the loan book, a narrower measure of the same program. ↩₁ ↩₂ ↩₃
10. GAO, "Restaurant Revitalization Fund: Opportunities Exist to Improve Oversight," GAO-22-105442, July 2022 (application portal opened May 3, 2021; approvals from May 7 and disbursements from May 10; 283,741 applications received; 100,572 of about 250,738 eligible applicants funded; $28.6 billion). The American Rescue Plan Act was signed March 11, 2021. ↩₁ ↩₂
11. Save Our Stages Act, S. 4258 (116th Congress), introduced July 22, 2020, by Sen. John Cornyn, cosponsored by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (govinfo record); $10,000,000,000 authorized in the bill as introduced. ↩
12. Save Our Stages Act, H.R. 7806 (116th Congress), introduced July 27, 2020, by Rep. Peter Welch (bill status record). ↩
13. Grants for shuttered venue operators, 15 U.S.C. § 9009a (enacted as § 324 of the Economic Aid to Hard-Hit Small Businesses, Nonprofits, and Venues Act, December 27, 2020): operational-on-February 29, 2020 and 25-percent revenue-reduction tests; grant of 45 percent of 2019 gross earned revenue capped at $10,000,000; venue-characteristics checklist ("Mixing equipment, a public address system, and a lighting rig"); initial 14-day and second 14-day priority periods (70 percent tier); $2,000,000,000 reserved for entities with not more than 50 full-time employees. ↩₁ ↩₂ ↩₃
14. American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, Pub. L. 117-2, § 5005, 135 Stat. 4 ($1,250,000,000 "to carry out section 324"; PPP-and-SVOG rule amended to permit both with post-December 27, 2020 PPP loans deducted); SBA, "American Rescue Plan Act Elevates Small Business Support," March 11, 2021 (original: https://www.sba.gov/article/2021/mar/11/american-rescue-plan-act-elevates-small-business-support-response-covid-19-pandemic). The $16.25 billion total also appears in OIG Report 21-13. ↩₁ ↩₂ ↩₃
15. Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021, Pub. L. 116-260, December 27, 2020, Economic Aid to Hard-Hit Small Businesses, Nonprofits, and Venues Act §324(a)(1)(A)(vi)(III) as enacted: the applicant "has not received, on or after the date of enactment of this Act, a loan guaranteed under paragraph (36) or (37) of section 7(a) of the Small Business Act." ↩
16. SBA, "Isabella Casillas Guzman Confirmed as 27th SBA Administrator," March 18, 2021 (original: https://www.sba.gov/article/2021/mar/18/isabella-casillas-guzman-confirmed-27th-sba-administrator): confirmed March 16, 2021, 81-17. ↩
17. SBA Office of Inspector General, "Management Alert: Serious Concerns About SBA's Control Environment and the Tracking of Performance Results in the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant Program," Report 21-13, April 7, 2021. ↩
18. USASpending.gov, award record for SBA call order 73351022F0236 to Navancio LLC (original: https://api.usaspending.gov/api/v2/awards/CONT_AWD_73351022F0236_7300_73351022A0024_7300/): "Shuttered Venue Operators Grant Program (SVOG) Salesforce Software as a Service Systems Development," signed September 27, 2022, under blanket purchase agreement 73351022A0024; $6,543,471.21 obligated, $7,388,874.10 including options, $6,775,342.10 in outlays. ↩
19. EIN Presswire, "CloudWave Inc. Teams up with Navancio to Win a $23 Million SBA Blanket Purchase Agreement for Salesforce Services," December 13, 2022 (original: https://www.einpresswire.com/article/605495255/). ↩
20. SBA Office of Inspector General, "SBA's Award and Payment Practices in the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant Program," Report 22-15, July 5, 2022 (11,974 grants totaling $9.7 billion as of September 20, 2021; ten sampled awards without documentation signed by an authorized official, $33.2 million; three awards $2.6 million above requested amounts; 1,849 awards totaling $1.49 billion with budgets not reconciling to award amounts). ↩
21. SBA Office of Inspector General, "Improvements Needed in SBA's Shuttered Venue Operators Grant Post-Award Review Process," Report 24-21, July 10, 2024 (30 staff assigned to review 2,162 of 13,011 awards; 155 selected for eligibility review; 165 reviews completed as of February 5, 2024; "At this pace, we estimate it will take 19 years, or until February 2043, to complete the remaining reviews"; 1,818 additional high-risk awards totaling $1.6 billion warranting eligibility review). Also served as a source document. ↩
22. SBA Office of Inspector General, "Top Management and Performance Challenges Facing the Small Business Administration in Fiscal Year 2026," Report 26-01, December 18, 2025, https://www.oversight.gov/sites/default/files/documents/reports/2025-12/SBA%20OIG%20Report%2026-01%20-%20Top%20Management%20and%20Performance%20Challenges%20Facing%20the%20SBA%20in%20Fiscal%20Year%202026.pdf. ↩
23. MomoCon, LLC v. SBA, No. 1:21-cv-02386 (D.D.C.), memorandum opinion February 10, 2022 (remand) and opinion December 22, 2023 (SBA prevails after remand); Sokol World Entertainment v. SBA, No. 1:21-cv-02385 (D.D.C.), opinion September 28, 2022 (remand) and opinion March 20, 2025 (SBA prevails after remand). ↩

Primary sources used in this article

• SBA OIG Report 24-02: Internal Controls to Prevent SVOG Grants to Ineligible Applicants
• SBA OIG Report 22-15: SVOG Award and Payment Practices
• SBA OIG Report 25-21: SVOG Recipient Oversight
• SBA OIG Report 24-21: SVOG Post-Award Review Process
• SBA OIG Report 23-09: COVID-19 Pandemic EIDL and PPP Loan Fraud Landscape
• SBA OIG Report 21-13: Management Alert on the SVOG Control Environment
• GAO-22-105442: Restaurant Revitalization Fund
• SVOG award file, as of July 5, 2022
• 15 U.S.C. § 9009a