The release of the Paycheck Protection Plan (PPP) loan data was intended to bring transparency to the $ 517 billion loan program to support small businesses during the pandemic of coronavirus. But the mistakes of some banks may have caused more transparency than the Small Business Administration (SBA) had planned.
A quartz analysis of the data shows that there are at least 842 occasions when a loan applicant’s name appears in a place where it shouldn’t. In some cases, that means that an organization’s loan data contains the name of a person involved in applying for it. In most cases, it is the result of the applicant’s name that finds its way into the city field of the recipient’s mailing address.
Of these 842 loans, 792 were for less than $ 150,000, which should have given the recipient more confidentiality under the SBA’s release policies. The data files for those loans don’t even contain a field to name the recipient. The data lists loans of more than $ 150,000 as a range rather than an accurate number, and the problem affects loans of between $ 36.9 million and $ 54.2 million in total that claim to retain around 6,000 jobs.
This error appears almost exclusively on loans prepared by Bank of America. The bank declined to comment on this story.
In the fine print of the PPP loan application, applicants were warned that their name could be publicly disclosed through requests for records, so the disclosure of this information should not be too concerning from a privacy point of view. However, the fact that errors are so biased towards a bank should give Bank of America customers a pause. These loans account for only 0.25% of bank loans, but made the mistake at a 337-fold higher rate than JPMorgan, which had 0.0007% of its loans with the name error for the city.
To find these loans, we compared the city indicated with the ones that the United States Postal Service associates with the zip code of the loan. We then narrowed the list down to just those with city fields that contained both a name from a list of 98,000 American names and a name from a list of 162,000 American last names. To eliminate common misspellings, we further narrowed the list by looking only at possible names that appear less than 10 times in the data. Finally, we check the resulting list by hand to remove misspelled or misattributed city names.
