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L. Scott Askins

General counsel and chief compliance officer of Kabbage during its 2020 PPP lending, when it approved 297,587 loans for $7 billion by its own count. The Justice Department's False Claims Act case does not name her. She is a defendant in the Kabbage bankruptcy estate's pending civil suit, where her motion to dismiss says the lender certification she signed was made "[t]o the best of its knowledge" and was backed by outside reviews.

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PPP
Type
Person
Role
Executive
Programs
PPP
Updated

In the archive

Identity and role

L. Scott Askins was Kabbage's General Counsel, Chief Compliance Officer, and Corporate Secretary, according to a 2021 Coastal States Bank/CoastalSouth announcement, when Kabbage was an American Express company. Kabbage's own 2017 OCC/CFPB comment letter also identifies Scott Askins as General Counsel of Kabbage, Inc.

Biography / career arc

The CoastalSouth announcement describes more than 20 years of C-suite experience, an earlier decade at Premiere Global Services, board service at the Innovative Lending Platform Association; the 2023 proxy statement carries her board biography.

Pandemic relief role

Askins is not a March 2020 OnDeck-letter signatory and is not named in the DOJ's individual Kabbage complaint. She held Kabbage's general counsel and compliance roles during the period covered by the Kabbage profile. Kabbage itself became a PPP lender, later resolved company-level FCA allegations through the KServicing bankruptcy estate (DOJ release) and faced a separate DOJ civil complaint against former executives (DOJ release).

Kabbage lent while SBA was still writing the program's rules. Lenders began approving PPP loans on April 3, 2020, a week after the CARES Act became law. SBA had issued 22 interim final rules by June 30 (SBA Inspector General, Report 21-07), and its FAQ reached 53 questions by December, 39 of them posted in April (SBA PPP FAQ, December 9, 2020). SBA's first rule let lenders rely on borrowers' own certifications (interim final rule, 85 Fed. Reg. 20811), and the Kabbage profile sets out the rule changes and what they required of lenders.

No personal enforcement action, civil settlement, debarment, or criminal charge involving Askins was identified. Neither DOJ release names Askins. She is a defendant in the Kabbage bankruptcy estate's civil suit, described below.

The estate's lawsuit

In October 2025 the Kabbage bankruptcy estate named Askins among five former officers it sued for breach of fiduciary duty, alongside former directors and investors, over Kabbage's PPP compliance and the American Express sale (KServicing Wind Down Corp. v. Frohwein, Adv. No. 25-52372, Bankr. D. Del.). The complaint says she signed Kabbage's SBA lender agreement, Form 3507, certifying that Kabbage complied with PPP requirements. It also quotes her internal emails from 2020, among them a July joke about a fraudulent borrower's company and a September question whether a 0.2 percent rejection rate meant "we let stuff through" (complaint, Doc 1, ¶¶ 100, 160, 259). Those are allegations; no court has ruled on them.

Her motion to dismiss replies to these points. It says the form certified compliance only "[t]o the best of its knowledge," and that outside reviews supported that belief. The motion names two: Treliant's 2019 audit of Kabbage's anti-money-laundering program, and an Alvarez & Marsal review covering the weeks after she signed, which found the PPP program consistent with SBA and anti-money-laundering requirements. It says fraud controls were outside her role, a point it says the complaint accepts. The complaint quotes the anti-money-laundering officer's warning that existing customers might skip identity checks. The motion says the PPP rules did not require new identity checks for existing customers, citing SBA's interim final rule (85 Fed. Reg. 20811), and quotes the rest of the chain: a program manager wrote back the next day, a Saturday, that Kabbage was "writing code today" to run every PPP applicant through those checks; the officer replied, "AMAZING! Thank you!" The motion says setting the $1 million litigation reserve for the American Express sale was not her job, and that Kabbage's outside counsel and chief financial officer both considered it adequate. Of the emails about borrower fraud, it says each concerned fraud by borrowers, not by Kabbage, and shows her surprise and her effort to check the facts (memorandum in support of Askins's motion to dismiss, Adv. No. 25-52372, Doc 103, April 9, 2026, pp. 6–9, 11–12, 25–26). No ruling on the motion appears in the filings we have.

Where they are now (2025–2026)

CoastalSouth Bancshares and Coastal States Bank announced her addition to their boards in 2021. Her later roles are cited to LinkedIn (self-reported).

Documents on this site

Original source documents and archived copies

Sources

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