Continuing Appropriations Act, 20201 and Other Extensions Act--

Floor Speech

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Mr. ROUNDS. Mr. President, first of all, let me thank my colleague from North Dakota for making this presentation to begin with and my colleague from North Carolina for supporting him in this action. We appreciate the comments the Senator from Maryland has made, but we, most certainly, disagree with the approach he is suggesting.

Senator Cramer has suggested that we have a very serious problem here that has to be addressed. This is something that does not affect just Republican businesses. It affects all businesses. You are talking about 4.2 million small businesses across the United States that are being impacted by this that have borrowed money in good faith and that have kept their businesses open. Now, surprisingly, when it comes time for the forgiveness portion of this to occur, we have a very challenging process put in place--a burdensome process--that could only have been done with the common sense found in Washington, DC, not in the rest of the country. To make the application more difficult for one to get forgiveness than the actual application to participate in the program in the first place is simply absurd.

Let me share with you a message from one of our bank executives in South Dakota. He is a rather prominent CEO in South Dakota. I share with you that I have cleaned this up a little bit and will paraphrase his quote to us after we asked him for information concerning how the banks will try to handle this.

Remember, the banks didn't have to participate in this, but they did so, in a way, to literally get money out in a very short period of time to the businesses that desperately needed the money in order to survive.

First of all, they had open lines of communication with the SBA literally 24/7 for more than a week in their trying to get approval for individual applications. They helped small businesses actually fill out the applications in the first place. Second of all, these banks will become responsible for these loans, and unless they are forgiven, they will stay with the banks.

If we are successful in coming to an agreement on additional loans being made in the future, how in the world can we expect these banks to get back in if we can't even follow up on our agreement that we would make this a simple process to get the loans forgiven in the first tranche that we have completed?

Let me share with you what this CEO writes. This has to do with his version of what is going on. We have literally received dozens of these types of comments from bank loan officers in the Upper Midwest, particularly in South Dakota. I will paraphrase because, as I say, we had to clean this up a little bit.

The forgiveness piece of the PPP is a disaster. I have 750 loans out of 1,381 that are under $20,000 and 50 that are under $2,000. They have, basically, the same forgiveness process as the loans of my largest borrower, which is for over $4 million. So we are asking them to fill out the same paperwork as we do a large loan recipient.

He goes on to write:

The simplified version of the PPP loan forgiveness application program is not that simple. The Government Accountability Office has studied it and has said that it takes a borrower 15 hours to complete and the lender 75 hours to process.

Let me say that again. It takes 15 hours for the loan borrower to actually do the paperwork and 75 hours to process it.

Our borrowers are not happy nor are we as bankers. This is not what we signed up for in order to get disaster payments to our customers. We are trying to hold off the small businesses that borrowed under $150,000, but they are getting anxious. We as lenders busted our tails to get this money out, and we are getting absolutely hosed by this process.

I might add that this is not the word he used.

Lenders feel as though they have really been let down. There is more than a little fatigue with the entire PPP loan forgiveness process.

If we used any kind of common sense like they have in the Upper Midwest, we would have fixed this thing already. Unfortunately, it is in the middle of a political process in Washington, DC, and 4.2 million small businesses hang in the balance. Their ability to take care of a loan--that we had committed would be forgiven if they were to follow through--is now in jeopardy. Time is running out.

I appreciate the opportunity, once again, to support the legislation that Senator Cramer from North Dakota has proposed. I hope that our colleagues on both sides of the aisle will come back and start using some of that common sense that seems to prevail in the rest of the United States even though it is not always evident here in Washington, DC.

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