Many small business owners who have been approved for Paycheck Protection Program loans (“PPP”) are realizing that the loan isn’t as forgivable as they’d hoped.
The amount a small business can qualify to have forgiven must primarily be payroll costs. The SBA’s rule making has stated that at least 75% of the forgiveness request must be payroll costs but can also contain up to 25% of other approved expenses under the law such as rent, mortgage interest and utilities. That rule seems to be widely understood and so long as small business owners are spending 75% of their PPP funds on payroll this rule won’t frustrate small business owners when it comes time to forgiveness. Unfortunately, there is an additional restriction on loan forgiveness requests which penalizes a small business if they do not bring back the same number of workers they had before the pandemic.
