Regions Bank: Paid $4.9M Over One PPP Loan

Type: Bank; PPP lender of record
Legal entities: Regions Bank, an Alabama state-chartered commercial bank and Federal Reserve member; holding company Regions Financial Corporation
Headquarters: Birmingham, Alabama

SBA's loan-level file credits Regions Bank with 78,547 loans and $6.4 billion in approved dollars, the 18th-largest book by dollars.¹ On May 22, 2026 Regions agreed to pay the United States $4,919,631 to resolve allegations that it approved forgiveness of a PPP loan that was not eligible for it and was paid by SBA as a result. The Justice Department's release says the claim "reflects allegations only" and that there has been no determination of liability.²

The PPP book

Regions entered the pandemic with 1,369 branch outlets and 2,083 ATMs across the South, the Midwest and Texas.³ In the SBA file its loans averaged $81,720 and went to 67,840 borrowers, who reported 782,828 jobs. Modeled loan by loan from SBA's published fee schedule, Regions' processing fees come to $268.5 million: $156.8 million on 2020 first-draw loans, $28.3 million on 2021 first-draw loans and $83.4 million on 2021 second-draw loans. That ranks 25th of 4,688 originating lenders.¹ SBA never published what it paid each lender.

At the end of 2020 Regions had about 42,000 PPP loans outstanding, worth about $3.6 billion, down from $4.6 billion at the end of September as forgiveness began.³ Its 10-K for 2021 gives the total: "Regions originated PPP loans totaling approximately $6.2 billion, of which approximately 12,600 loans totaling approximately $748 million remain outstanding as of December 31, 2021." The same filing credits part of that year's rise in net interest income to PPP, noting that "the fees related to loan forgiveness increased as the loan forgiveness process continued throughout 2021."⁴ It did not borrow against them: as of December 31, 2020 it had not used the Federal Reserve's PPP Liquidity Facility.³

Chief executive John M. Turner described the first round to investors on June 9, 2020. Regions had "participated in the origination of over 40,000 Paycheck Protection Program loans with an average size of about $114,000," he said. Ninety-eight percent went to customers with 100 or fewer employees, and "today about 70% of that money still sits in the bank."⁵

Questions from the Senate

On April 23, 2020, Senate Small Business Committee Chairman Marco Rubio wrote to the chief executives of twelve large banks, Regions among them, citing reports that some banks had prioritized existing clients. The letters asked whether each bank ran applications first-come, first-served or through filters that favored certain borrowers, with answers due May 1.⁶ We do not have Regions' reply.

The agents' lawsuits

Accountants and consultants who helped borrowers apply sued dozens of lenders in spring 2020 for a share of the lender fees. Regions Financial Corporation and Regions Bank were the only defendants in Leigh, King, Norton & Underwood, LLC's class action in the Northern District of Alabama, No. 2:20-cv-00591. It was one of the twelve cases listed in the May 22, 2020 motion to centralize the litigation.⁷ A second class action, filed June 5, 2020 in the Southern District of Florida by Full Compliance, LLC and Zamora & Hernandez, PLLC, named Regions Bank among twenty lenders.⁸

Regions opposed centralization. Its brief to the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation argued that federal law gives agents no private right of action. It also called the suits premature: "The law says that any agent fees will be paid 'out of' the 'lender fees' received from the SBA, so the banks are unable to do anything on agent fees until they receive their lender fees."⁹ The panel denied centralization on August 5, 2020, and the suits stayed in their home courts.¹⁰ How the agent cases ended elsewhere is in The Agents Got Nothing.

The forgiveness settlement

The 2026 settlement turns on one loan. According to the Justice Department, on or about August 3, 2021 Regions approved forgiveness of a PPP loan that an individual had obtained through the bank, although the loan was not eligible. The government alleged that Regions was "unjustly enriched" by the payment SBA then made to it. The Civil Division's Commercial Litigation Branch and the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Western District of Missouri handled the matter, with help from SBA's general counsel and inspector general and the FDIC's inspector general.² The release does not name the borrower or give the loan's size; the settlement amount is the only dollar figure in it.

In the fraud files

Regions appears in a number of criminal PPP cases, mostly as the bank where proceeds were deposited. In one it was the lender: according to a federal information filed in the Eastern District of Tennessee on April 14, 2022, George Thacker applied to Regions on May 4, 2020 for a $257,800 PPP loan for Thacker Corp.¹¹

Marco Rubio — wrote to Regions and eleven other large banks about their PPP intake in April 2020.

Regions Bank

The PPP book

Questions from the Senate

The agents' lawsuits

The forgiveness settlement

In the fraud files

Related profiles

Sources