The archive · Interactives
Follow a payment. Compare the rules. Test a claim. Explore the pandemic economy through calculators, maps and the records behind them.
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ChartWhere the fee money wentPPP lender processing fees from the SBA to the top 25 lenders, the companies they paid, and onward. Select any lender or recipient to trace its money.Open the fee map ↗Three places to start
Pick a question. Open the evidence.Repricing the 2021 PPP loans under the 2020 fee schedule reduces the computed lender fees by $8.74 billion. See what changed.
Search 91,448 matched recipient records, including 77,155 high-confidence matches. Other matches are leads to check.
Search the overlap ↗
Nine loan files. Play the reviewer, then check your decisions against the record.
Take the loan-file quiz ↗New · Maps
State and district maps built from the archive's own tables, with the numbers in a table under every map. See all maps.
Suspended borrowers per 1,000 PPP and COVID EIDL loans. Highest: Illinois, 126.4.Open the map 
3,360 criminal case rows placed in 92 of the 94 federal districts.Open the map 
Modeled processing fees for the 25 largest lenders. First: JPMorgan Chase Bank, $1.79 billion.Open the table The full collection
All 34 interactives, across six topics. Search for a program, company or question, then narrow by topic or format.
How the schemes worked, how fraud is counted, and what the courts did with the cases.
Of 1,977 classified pandemic relief-fraud cases, 246 carry identity-theft indicators — 12.4% of prosecuted cases, a lower bound. Among the 831 cases tagged to EIDL, the rate rises to 16.1%.
A PPP application advertised in about five minutes, 3.7 million GAO-flagged PPP and EIDL recipients, 937 federal benefits-fraud sentencings in fiscal 2024.
Seven pandemic relief programs, two desks.
2,709 Justice Department pandemic-fraud cases in one table: how big the frauds were, where they were charged and how they end.
A cleaned set of 783 pandemic relief-fraud sentences with a real custodial term, drawn from a 1,130-row ledger. The median sentence is 36 months.
A plain-language walkthrough of the documented fraud schemes across PPP, EIDL, unemployment, and the ERC.
SBA OIG, GAO, and the conviction record measure PPP fraud with numbers 100x apart — >$200B flagged, ~$36B 'likely' across SBA's pandemic programs, >$2B charged.
SBA can refuse to buy back a defaulted PPP guaranty — a decades-old lever lenders used to sue over.
From the 1976 confidentiality wall to a real-time API that met its deadline for individual transcripts, left the business half at least six months behind, and could be used by the 6.6% of IVES taxpayers who had the IRS online account it requires: how relief programs were designed to move money before the IRS could check it. Thirty-six events, each tagged legislative, executive, operational, or oversight.
PPP, COVID-EIDL, the grant programs, and the businesses that drew on more than one. Relief in other countries is compared in the ten-country scorecard.
Rideshare and delivery drivers got 40,461 PPP loans in 2020 and 409,313 in 2021, three-quarters via the Womply and Blueacorn lender networks.
The searchable companion to the program-overlap chart: all 91,448 businesses that drew on two or more of PPP, EIDL, RRF and SVOG — $60.9 billion combined.
A looser-match view of pandemic aid overlap: 195,574 entities and $117.86 billion (grants plus loan face value).
PPP, COVID-EIDL, PPPLF and Main Street ran on different rails and failed in different ways: eleven charts comparing the four by channel, geography, controls and afterlife.
An interactive map of program overlap: 91,448 entities matched across PPP, EIDL, the Restaurant Revitalization Fund and Shuttered Venue grants.
COVID-EIDL explorer: 3.68 million direct SBA loans, $370.3 billion in face value, a $44.6 billion expected cost on the government's books (an estimate, not losses), by state, month, size and type.
A dated visual record of the pandemic small-business moment, 2020–2022: 11 street photographs set against six captures of online loan portals and their marketing.
109 program-figures across 24 countries from a 114-row primary-source register: fraud and error rates that measure different things, rescue size where a source stated it, and who each country paid.
The Shuttered Venue Operators Grant delivered $14.6B to 13,011 venues — almost double the $7.5B the same sector drew from PPP.
Of 11,468,210 PPP loans, 721,552 were for exactly $20,833, the self-employed ceiling, and 5,842 for exactly $2 million. Bunching at a limit can be the formula at work, not proof of misuse.
Who made the loans, and which fintech channels fed them.
An interactive bubble chart of every major PPP lender: share of 11.47 million loans against dollars, jobs or businesses served.
Where seven 2020 PPP lender cohorts got their 2021 second draws: 78,257 of 283,560 borrowers matched.
Blueacorn and Womply facilitated 1.07 million of the 1.3 million PPP loans made through community-development lenders, reaching low-income and HUBZone tracts at about twice the banks' rate.
Weekly 2021 PPP approvals at three Womply partner lenders and Blueacorn’s two, from SBA loan-level data: second draws came a median 23 days after the first, vs 49. Lines are upper bounds.
An interactive map of every actor that touched pandemic relief.
Where PPP processing fees went, and the court fights over them.
PPP lender processing fees from the SBA to the top 25 lenders, the companies they paid, and onward. Select any lender or recipient to trace its money.
Capital Plus Financial’s December 2022 list of unpaid PPP fees, $109.0 million in seven lines, and the later record for each line.
Eleven lawsuits, arbitrations and petitions between Blueacorn, its founders, Capital Plus, Prestamos, PayNerd, Womply and JPMorgan Chase, with outcomes.
Blueacorn took in about $1.09 billion in 2021 PPP fees; a House report says $666 million of it went to a marketing firm run by its leadership.
Where oversight lawyers went next, and what the PPP world gave to campaigns.
Seventeen moves by congressional, Justice Department and FTC lawyers and inspectors general who worked on pandemic-relief oversight or enforcement.
Of the 1,000 names the archive mentions most, 431 have no FEC record; the 266 confident donor matches lean Democratic, 158 to 79. A name match is not proof of identity.
Toby Scammell ($1.36M) and Dan Gilbert ($1.23M) are 49% of the $5.27 million that 47 people from the PPP world gave in itemized federal records, 2016–2026.
Pick the fraud definition, rerun the fee schedule, or judge nine loan files.
An interactive that lets you pick which relief programs to count and at which bar — flagged as potential fraud, judged likely, or charged in federal cases.
Play the loan reviewer. Nine pandemic-relief loan files — seven are real frauds that ended in federal convictions, two are illustrative legitimate borrowers who only looked suspicious.
PPP paid lenders $38.236B in origination fees. Rerun 2021's loans under the leaner 2020 fee schedule and the bill drops $8.74B.
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