PIERRE, SD – Banks and businesses have been dealing with the details of the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) since Congress authorized it in March as part of the economic bailout.
Helping businesses convert the loans to a forgivable loan is the next big step, according to South Dakota Bank President Rob Stephenson.
“It’s going to be a huge part of work that needs to be done,” says Stephenson. “The Small Business Administration has provided about half of the information that borrowers and lenders need to be able to know how that’s going to work.”
Stephenson says PPP loan money needed to be spent on keeping workers on the payroll over eight weeks in order for the businesses to be considered for loan forgiveness.
“The good thing is that the money is out there. What customers and banks are going to learn is how much of that they don’t have to repay,” says Stephenson. “An awful lot of them were confident that it was going to be all of or most all of that money they don’t have to repay.”
A lot of ag producers were not included in the first round of the program. Stephenson says that part of the program did not go well.
“Farmers didn’t get taken care of the first time around. I think an awful lot of them did the second time around. But a lot didn’t just because of how people file their taxes or how things might have gone for them in 2018-2019.”
He continued, “Certainly, everybody didn’t get helped. But it still was a great program to inject money into economies. It just wasn’t entirely fair. No program of the federal government ever has been.”
The US House has voted to give businesses up to 24 weeks to use the federal funding.
