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Call the SBA with a question that requires a definitive answer, though, and you get an uncertain or ambiguous answer. Call multiple SBA representatives with the same question and get multiple answers.

Small Business owners have come to rely on the SBA during the COVID-19 pandemic to provide a vital financial lifeline to keep their businesses alive as they struggle with the various challenges of the pandemic disaster. When a Small Business owner asks questions, whether they’re general questions about the EIDL process, or specific questions about the Small Business’ EIDL application, they expect specific and hopefully detailed answers.

Question to the SBA: “Now that the loan will be declined for Reconsideration because the IRS hasn’t processed the tax return, how long does the applicant have to file another Reconsideration?”

I don’t even remember what the answer was because it was so vague and ambiguous.

“Good morning SBA, what is the current turnaround time, on average, for EIDL Reconsiderations?” or
“Hello SBA, if I file a Reconsideration request today, how soon can I expect that my file will be assigned to a Loan Officer at the Reconsideration team?”

The Small Business owner cannot get reasonable or certain answers to these questions.

Trevor worked in retail electronics in the 1980’s in customer service. When a customer brought a VCR or stereo system in for repair, he could provide the customer with a reasonable expectation for turnaround time for their repair. Even if they had to order parts for the device to repair it, they could know within a reasonable range of time, when those parts were due to arrive and when the technician could be expected to complete the repair.

They knew the repair intake process, the repair tech servicing queue, the quality control check process, and even when the product was on the truck for delivery back to the store for customer pickup. And this was with electronics repairs where anything could happen with the electronic device once it was on the repair bench and the tech tried to solve the repair problem.

Customers had a reasonable expectation to receive unambiguous information about the repair process.

“Hi there SBA! Can you please give me a status on my EIDL Reconsideration file?”
The Answer most often: “In process.”

What does that mean? Where in the process is the file? Has a Loan Officer reviewed the tax returns, read the transcripts from the IRS, etc.???

As a Mortgage Banker, Trevor knew every step of the way where the Applicant’s file was in the loan process: appraisal on order, appraisal received, verifications received, submitted to Underwriting, quality control review, clear for closing, and etcetera and etcetera.

While writing this blog, one of our clients for Reconsideration sent me a text message,
“This is like the old Heinze ketchup commercial, ‘Anticipation, it’s making me wait.’ Guessing no news is good news?”

When a Small Business owner begins their business day, they do so with a clear understanding of how their business operates, what they have to do to achieve their business goals, and their certainty in their methods for success. When they run up against the constant lack of clarity and certainty with their urgent EIDL financing requests at the SBA, their COVID crisis anxiety increases exponentially.

This is unacceptable.

The Small Business Administration, in its mission to advocate for Small Business, needs to do a spectacularly better job of providing clarity and specificity and to remove ambiguity and uncertainty from the process.

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We’ve seen the latest SBA reaction to new EIDL applications and EIDL Reconsiderations: They decline the loan due to unverifiable information. Based on conversations we’ve had with SBA personnel and documents we’ve submitted, this appears to be mostly the SBA’s way of preventing fraud on these loans by requesting additional levels of documentation, essentially to prove it’s a real and legitimate business and not a fake farm in Maine.

Your best course of action follows the advice we continually give: Be patient and persistent with the process. We know you’re desperate for the money and in our professional opinion, SBA is overreacting to fraud by making all the legitimate businesses jump through hoops to get this desperately needed funding.

Be prepared to submit the following:

• 2019 tax return
• Signed IRS 4506T
• SBA Form 2202 Schedule of Liabilities
• Driver’s License
• VOIDED check

Be prepared for other possible verifiable information about your business such as:

• Articles of Formation
• Proof of filing your EIN with the IRS or DBA certificates or other registrations with your town, city, county or State

2. How to submit your Driver’s License to the SBA for your EIDL loan or Reconsideration

Since December, we’re seeing more and more that SBA Loan Officers are requesting an image of your Driver’s License by way of an actual smartphone photo that you snap and email directly to the Loan Officer. In other words, they won’t accept a PDF. As with our other video about “unverifiable information” this appears to be yet another level of fraud prevention on the part of SBA to confirm that you are a legitimate and real person.

3. Wet Signatures and your SBA EIDL Reconsideration

More and more since February, on the many Reconsiderations we’re working on, the SBA loan officers are requesting an ink or “wet” signature on forms and documents you submit. In other words, they’re not accepting electronic signatures. For the average Small Business Owner, this might not be much of a hassle, unless you don’t have access to a printer and scanner.

Many folks these days don’t. It’s certainly inconvenient for our process at Aurora Consulting since we’re busy assisting our clients on their Reconsiderations and preparing their documents and sending to them for electronic signatures so they can keep running their business to keep their business alive during the pandemic.

As we have always stated in our documents submission videos for the SBA Reconsiderations: Be sure you sign and date your forms and now, more than ever, sign with a pen, scan it and submit it.

Information keeps changing because procedures keep changing.

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Please find below our point by point recommendations on how to to submit your Reconsideration request to SBA:

• NEVER file a 2nd application. You must only submit a Reconsideration request.
• Send an email to [email protected] with your request
• In the SUBJECT LINE put: “Reconsideration: EIDL #XXXXXXXX
• In the body of the email state simply:
  “I hereby request a Reconsideration of my EIDL Loan #XXXXX.  Please find attached the following documents:”
  (LIST YOUR DOCUMENTS)

Documents to include:

• Credit Authorization letter (see below)
• Credit Explanation letter (see below)
• IRS 4506T
• SBA Form 2202 Schedule of Liabilities
• Business Plan summary (see below)
• Business Revenue Projection (see below)
• VOIDED check
• 2019 Federal tax return (all pages)
• 2020 DRAFT tax return (all pages; indicate DRAFT)
• Clear, color scan of front and back of Driver’s License

Your Reconsideration letter should be SUPER SIMPLE. Don’t overload the Loan Officer with details of your struggle.
Keep your explanation to a few concise sentences, such as:
“My business was a new enterprise. We were beginning to produce and sell product when COVID-19 caused a severe economic injury.  We have pivoted our Business Plan to adapt to the challenging circumstances of the pandemic (see attached Business Plan Summary and Revenue Projection). We need assistance from the SBA EIDL program to help us to move forward and survive the pandemic. If we do not receive this assistance we will likely fail as a business. If we fail, our employees will be out of work and our business will no longer contribute to the fabric of the American economic community.”

• CREDIT AUTHORIZATION wording: “I hereby authorize SBA to obtain an updated credit report for my EIDL Reconsideration.”
• CREDIT EXPLANATION: Do not discuss your credit score.  Simply address the challenges in life and/or business that affected your ability to pay credit accounts on time.  For example: “In early 2019 I experienced severe financial crisis due to (DIVORCE/MEDICAL/JOB LOSS/ETC).  I have worked to improve my credit.”
  KEEP your explanation short, and concise. The Loan Officer will not “judge” you; they simply require an acknowledgment  of your previous credit history problems.
• Business Plan Summary: Keep it concise and explain the changes you made to adapt to the pandemic and how your business will succeed with these same challenges over the coming 12-24 months.
• Business Revenue Projections: Broken down by Quarter with annual totals for the next 12 months.
• SBA Form 2202

Be sure to include on EACH explanation letter your full name, Business name, Business address, EIN and EIDL #.

Sign and date EACH document, including tax returns. WET signatures are preferred.

Next steps after submitting:

After 5 calendar days, call SBA to confirm receipt. At that time SBA Agent might give you feedback on status, but probably too soon.
Be sure to check SPAM folder as SBA emails often wind up there
Be patient with the process. Timelines for Reconsiderations can be all over the map: days, or weeks, or months.  Patience and persistence are the key characteristics of success with SBA EIDL Reconsiderations.

I hope you find this information useful!  If this process seems overly complicated or onerous, our Consulting program covers all aspects of Disaster Relief Financing, including Reconsiderations, and PPP loans, State and Local Grants and any other Stimulus programs to help a business to survive this horrible disaster.

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We’re working on quite a few Reconsiderations for our clients. Here’s some advice for you all based on our recent conversations with SBA Agents and documents requests from the Reconsideration Team at SBA:

• IRS 4506T: The IRS is requiring a “wet” signature on the form. That means you have to physically sign a paper version with a pen, scan it in to your computer and submit. We’ve been using DocuSign for our clients’ forms successfully for the most part, but recently hit a snag with one file where the Reconsideration Team kept requesting a new 4506T. In my conversation with an excellent SBA Agent, she revealed this concept of the “wet” signature. Trevor was a Mortgage Loan Officer prior to our Consulting business and we’ve used DocuSign for years. Oh. Well.
• Revenue Projection and Business Plan. We’ve noticed from posts in a Facebook Group and now with two of our own clients that SBA is requesting a revenue projection for the next 12 months. Between you and me and the wall, I’m not sure how any Small Business can project revenue during an ongoing pandemic, but SBA is asking for it. We haven’t determined yet how we’re going to respond to this request. The “Business Plan” aspect can, according to SBA, be a simple narrative of how you’re keeping your business running.
• SBA changing over the online portal the weekend of JAN 15-17. We’ve already noticed glitches in the online portal over the last few weeks. One SBA Agent opined this is probably the result of the system changeover. To that end, we recommend not submitting a new EIDL Application, or uploading requested documents through the portal, or submitting a new Reconsideration until after JAN 18. That’s our strategy for our clients, anyway.
• Funding Approved EIDL loans. For most of the past 10 months we’ve seen our clients receive funds within 48 hours of signing Closing Documents. In two instances in the past two weeks, funding took 5 calendar days. Nail-biting continues during the disaster.
• Continuing confusion of the EIDL Grants. We read an excellent article in an NFIB blog yesterday. The author sought to clear up this ongoing confusion about the $10,000 CARES Act EIDL Grants that many businesses either did not receive or received only partial amounts. Add to this the confusion over the NEW EIDL Grants under the Second Stimulus Legislation.

While we believe the NFIB is a “trusted resource” we defer to our own Chief Financing Rock Star, Trevor Curran who has 30+ years as a Mortgage Loan Officer originating Government loans: wait for the official Governmental guidance.

SBA has not yet released any rules regarding these EIDL Grants. There’s no update on the SBA website, and nothing in the email newsletter we received this morning from our SBA Regional office. While your anxiety over getting this much needed money continues (we feel your pain, we were shorted the Grant too!), our advice is to continue waiting for the official guidance from SBA on this matter.

We’re happy to share our professional experiences to provide vital—albeit anecdotal—information that you can use to achieve a successful result with your SBA EIDL and PPP requests! We hope this information helps!

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We know how frustrating it is to spend time and energy following up with the SBA on the status of Your EIDL loan or Reconsideration request!

We’re sharing our experiences from having worked on dozens of EIDL loans and our interactions with SBA Agents. We want to you to know you’re not alone in your frustration, but also to help you to understand how the system works.

1. WE LOVE SBA AGENTS! Every call we experience an SBA Agent who is very professional and eager to help business owners obtain the EIDL financing they need to survive this pandemic.

2. SBA Loan Officers are, to quote an SBA Agent, “Working 15 hour days” on loan requests and reconsideration requests.

3. Okay, once you understand the value of the intrepid SBA Agents and how enthusiastic and hard-working they are, let’s discuss the frustrations of follow up.

4. We did a video on “How To Speak With An SBA Agent” we recommend you watch that for tips on how to make your follow up call.

5. Next, know that SBA Agents don’t always have a complete picture on your loan status. Their system has notes about your file’s progress with “Codes.” We don’t know what those codes are, but let’s hypothesize that a typical code could be something like this: “9837: IRS Form received” or “9822: Email sent to Applicant”.

Trevor has seen coding like this in his previous career as a Mortgage Banker. It’s an efficient way for a system to track the progress of a file.We’ve spoken to a couple of Agents who told us they don’t know what some of the Codes mean when a file is in the Reconsideration system.

6. Apparently, the Reconsideration Team works like a “Black-Ops” enterprise. SBA Agents can’t speak with them and their Codes can’t be deciphered by the SBA Agent you call for a status.

7. Beware of general statements made by an SBA Agent such as “Reconsideration processing times are 5-6 weeks.” Another Agent told us that is not true; she’s seen Reconsiderations take substantially longer. She said the other Agent should never have made that statement. Moral of the story: Take anything an SBA Agent says on general matters with a grain of salt.

8. Don’t think you’re going to call and get very clear guidance. The SBA is STILL overwhelmed with the number of new and Reconsideration requests. There’s a lot of moving parts, a lot of confusion, and long waiting times.

9. Remain consistently vigilant, and always polite. Check in regularly on your file. You won’t always get a definitive answer, but once in a while you might discover the SBA sent you an email that you didn’t know they sent! We’ve seen that happen…the email was sitting in the client’s spam folder. Other times, no such email was received. Moving parts. Confusion. Not quite controlled chaos.

10. Patience is a virtue. We know you need this money to help you survive this pandemic. We know the SBA is working diligently. We also know that sometimes some folks in an organization (Bank, SBA, etc.) get a file and it sits there waiting its turn because that person in the organization is overwhelmed, confused, slow, or, maybe, just maybe, even lazy. Think of the real world and how folks work in your business; the SBA is no different.

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COVID-19 is ongoing with no definitive end point in sight.

“Old news” doesn’t describe the continuing inquiries we receive from anxious business owners. A quick scan of any relevant online forum about EIDL programs reveals the simple truth: business owners still struggle with EIDL loans they’ve obtained (utilization) and fighting for monies they need to survive.

The U.S. Congress and the Small Business Administration (The SBA) responded with amazing alacrity in the early days of this crisis to provide vital support to Americans and American businesses. Yes, there’s been tremendous chaos around those initiatives.

In our opinion, that chaos, specifically about EIDL program loans, arises from two sources.

First is the overwhelming number of requests. According to an SBA Press Release on October 28th, 2020, SBA has funded nearly 9 million loans worth $7 billion. Chaos or not, the SBA did an incredible job of helping American businesses with the two COVID-related loan programs, EIDL and Paycheck Protection Program (PPP).

Our second opinion about the chaotic state of SBA EIDL response focuses on the SBA’s internal operations mindset. We mentioned in our introduction the drastic difference between a natural disaster such as a tornado, flood or wildfire, and the COVID-19 disaster. This pandemic is like no other disaster ever experienced in American history. And yet, with all their heroics on the frontlines performed primarily by the amazing SBA agents, loan officers, and processing staff, the upper level SBA Administration applied standards more relevant to the traditional natural disaster phenomenon.

To this day, we are dumbfounded by the SBA’s Administration’s failure to radically adjust the thinking and ultimately guidelines and processes for the EIDL program.

As amazing as our Government’s response has been to the financial uncertainties of this pandemic, there is surely more assistance to come in the future. As of this writing there is no second stimulus package negotiated or finalized in Congress. It is our opinion this will change as the pandemic moves into the second year of human distress. With any future stimulus package there are sure to be improvements and revisions to existing SBA programs.

Presenting this information at this time, in our professional opinion, will help business owners understand the basics of the EIDL program in anticipation of just such changes. When you install a fire extinguisher in your house, you probably took a moment to read the directions, didn’t you? Hopefully, you’ll never need it, but a basic understanding of when and how to use the extinguisher will surely come in handy in the event of catastrophe.

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We’re often very blunt about things, especially Trevor as he is Scottish.  “Right between the eyes” is a favorite expression of his.  We don’t like to dance around the truth and we certainly despise getting someone’s hopes up about something that’s not reality.

These principles served both Linda Rey and Trevor very well during their respective careers in Insurance and Banking.

At Aurora Consulting, we embrace and continue to follow those principles to assist our business financing clients.

We’re going to give it to you now right between the eyes: We refuse to discuss proposed legislation about COVID-related stimulus and disaster financing until and at such time as, that legislation has passed the House of Representatives, the US Senate, and has been signed into law by the President. Period.

Passed gets our attention; proposed stays on our “pay no mind” list.

We relied on this attitude in the early days of the pandemic lockdowns when so much was complete chaos, speculation, despair and distress.  We fielded calls, texts, and emails from our friends, colleagues and clients, each of them despairing for any kind of positive news about Government assistance to help them survive the pandemic lockdown, whether about the EIDL program or the proposed CARES Act and the Paycheck Protection Program.

In every instance, we patiently listened to and carefully counselled folks.  We emphasized the word “patience” time and again and coined our phrase for the pandemic, “Ever-Evolving.”

Based on our guiding principles, we waited for concrete information.  The SBA website provided skimpy information at best for the Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) program.  We charged forward and submitted applications, spoke to several trusted and experienced colleagues, and submitted our clients’ applications, utilizing our decades’ of experience completing successful applications for loans and insurance.

We pivoted with each new challenge that came up, apprised our clients of the situation, and continued hammering at the wall until we achieved positive results.

We used the same methods for the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). We opted to wait to submit applications until there was more cogent guidance from Lenders and SBA on the functionality of the program.  When we finally submitted our clients’ applications we achieved positive results again.

There’s a lot of talk on the internet, especially on YouTube with glamourous videos, purporting to provide definitive knowledge of what’s in store for extended stimulus and disaster financing legislation.  We call that “static.” PLEASE subscribe to our channel for updates especially for our WTF Wednesday videos.

At Aurora Consulting, we seek results based on reality.  We don’t search for self-inflation of our professional egos by providing incomplete or inaccurate information to the general public at large or our clients in particular.

We know you’re impatient and desperate to hear there is more assistance on the way.  We know that we will wait until that proposed legislation becomes passed legislation.  Only then will we dive into the details to find results-based financing solutions for our clients.

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