The archive · Interactives
Follow a payment. Compare the rules. Test a claim. Explore the pandemic economy through calculators, maps and the records behind them.
Explore all 28 interactives ↓Related sections Data downloads · Rankings · Articles
Ways into
the record.
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 ↗The full collection
All 28 interactives, across nine topics. Search for a program, company or question, then narrow by format.
Seventeen moves by congressional, Justice Department and FTC lawyers and inspectors general who worked on pandemic-relief oversight or enforcement.
Cross-Program Synthesis & Policy
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.
Cross-Program Synthesis & Policy
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.
Cross-Program Synthesis & Policy
A looser-match view of pandemic aid overlap: 195,574 entities and $117.86 billion (grants plus loan face value).
Cross-Program Synthesis & Policy
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.
Cross-Program Synthesis & Policy
An interactive map of program overlap: 91,448 entities matched across PPP, EIDL, the Restaurant Revitalization Fund and Shuttered Venue grants.
Cross-Program Synthesis & Policy
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.
EIDL
Of 1,977 classified pandemic relief-fraud cases, 246 carry identity-theft indicators — 12.4% of prosecuted cases, a lower bound. Among the 849 cases tagged to EIDL, the rate rises to 16.1%.
Fraud Numbers & Measurement
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.
Fraud Numbers & Measurement
Seven pandemic relief programs, two desks.
Fraud Numbers & Measurement
2,709 Justice Department pandemic-fraud cases in one table: how big the frauds were, where they were charged and how they end.
Fraud Numbers & Measurement
A cleaned set of 763 pandemic relief-fraud sentences with a real custodial term, drawn from a 1,133-row ledger. The median sentence is 37 months.
Fraud Numbers & Measurement
A plain-language walkthrough of the documented fraud schemes across PPP, EIDL, unemployment, and the ERC.
Fraud Numbers & Measurement
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.
Fraud Numbers & Measurement
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.
Fraud Numbers & Measurement
Play the loan reviewer.
Fraud Numbers & Measurement
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.
How PPP Worked
PPP paid lenders $38.236B in origination fees.
How PPP Worked
SBA can refuse to buy back a defaulted PPP guaranty.
How PPP Worked
An interactive bubble chart of every major PPP lender: share of 11.47 million loans against dollars, jobs or businesses served.
How PPP Worked
Where seven 2020 PPP lender cohorts got their 2021 second draws: 78,257 of 283,560 borrowers matched.
How PPP Worked
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.
International Comparisons
Blueacorn and Womply facilitated 1.07 million of the 1.32 million PPP loans made through community-development lenders, reaching low-income and HUBZone tracts at about twice the banks' rate.
PPP Fintech Lenders & Platforms
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.
Pandemic Darlings — Womply, Blueacorn & Kabbage
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.
Pandemic Darlings — Womply, Blueacorn & Kabbage
The Shuttered Venue Operators Grant delivered $14.6B to 13,011 venues — almost double the $7.5B the same sector drew from PPP.
RRF & SVOG
An interactive map of every actor that touched pandemic relief.
The Relief Machines — Contractors
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.
The Relief Machines — Contractors
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