SBA's Handling of Identity Theft in the COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan Program

This report presents the results of our verification inspection of the U.S. Small Business Administration’s (SBA) corrective actions for the five recommendations from the Office of Inspector General (OIG) evaluation report SBA’s Handling of Identity Theft in the COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan Program (Report 21-15).

We initiated this verification inspection to determine whether the closed recommendations were fully implemented or if further corrective actions were needed. Accordingly, our objective was to determine the effectiveness of the corrective actions SBA implemented to 1) resolve credit-related issues for Coronavirus Disease 2019 Economic Injury Disaster Loan identity theft victims, 2) charge-off fraudulent loans and remove Uniform Commercial Code filing fees for loans associated with identity theft, and 3) review over 150,000 returned billing statements and resolve any involving identity theft.

We determined OIG Report 21-15 recommendations 1, 2, 3, and 4 to be fully implemented; however, SBA management has not fully implemented recommendation 5. We will track management’s execution by reopening the recommendation and will work with SBA to establish a target date for enacting corrective actions through the audit follow-up process.