Inspection of SBA's Initial Disaster Assistance Response to Hurricane Harvey

This report presents the results of our inspection of the Small Business Administration’s (SBA’s) initial disaster assistance response to Hurricane Harvey, a Category 4 hurricane that made landfall August 25, 2017.  It devastated much of southeastern Texas and affected residents of Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Kentucky, impacting about 13 million people.

We evaluated SBA’s response to Hurricane Harvey during the first 2 months following the disaster and found that overall, SBA’s initial response to Hurricane Harvey was expeditious.  Within 9 days after Hurricane Harvey was declared a disaster, SBA provided 33 staff for 2 DRCs set up by the Federal Emergency Management Agency in Texas, and it independently opened a BRC.  By the end of October 2017, SBA’s ODA had more than quadrupled its staff to 4,310 employees and had operated 84 recovery centers.  As of November 2, 2017, ODA had served 60,694 Hurricane Harvey disaster survivors.  Despite its quick initial response, due to the magnitude of the three successive hurricanes impacting the United States and its territories between August 25 and September 20, 2017, SBA was unable to meet all of its goals for disaster response. 

Also, by the end of October, SBA had accepted 88,803 Hurricane Harvey loan applications; however, 21,571, or about 24 percent, were in a backlog, waiting to be processed.  The high volume of loan applications received from all 3 disasters contributed to this backlog and resulted in a backlog for all 3, totaling 51,259 at the end of October, as well as a backlog of 11,565 damage loss verifications. By November 30, 2017, the number of Hurricane Harvey loans waiting to be processed was down to 7,066.

Lastly, we evaluated SBA’s processing time data for Hurricane Harvey disaster loan applications with a loan approval or denial decision as of October 30, 2017.  The average processing time was 17 days for applications that SBA was able to complete.  When these computer-generated declines were included, the overall average processing time was 11 days.  SBA has a goal to process disaster loan applications in 21–28 calendar days; however, because of the volume of loan applications in the backlog, we were unable to fully determine whether SBA met this goal.