U.S. Senator Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) joined Senators Jim Risch (R-Idaho) and John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) to introduce the bipartisan Streamlining EIDL Act to improve the Economic Injury Disaster Loans (EIDL) application process for small businesses and combat programmatic fraud. The legislation will require the Small Business Administration (SBA) to provide timely and helpful responses to small business applicants and submit a report to Congress on how it is addressing fraud within the program.
“Small businesses are critical to Las Vegas’s economy, which is why it’s vital for this federal aid to be easy to access and available for everyone who needs it. I’ll keep working to ensure that our small businesses have the resources necessary to support their workers and keep their doors open,” Cortez Masto told the Asian Journal.
The Streamlining EIDL Act would impose commonsense deadlines on the EIDL program, require the SBA to conduct a comprehensive review of the process for submitting EIDL applications, direct the SBA to submit a report to Congress detailing steps it has taken to rectify its handling of identity theft cases, require the SBA to report how it has recovered improper payments, and require the SBA to report on how it is reconciling previous identity theft allegations with newly filed identity theft allegations.
Senator Cortez Masto has been a strong advocate for small businesses in the Senate, leading legislation to protect small businesses from expensive data breaches and cyber-attacks and to help small businesses partner with institutions of higher education to conduct research and development. Throughout the pandemic, she has helped pass the CARES Act and additional coronavirus relief legislation to provide economic relief and Small Business Administration (SBA) loans to small businesses and supported an additional $370 billion in funding for the SBA’s Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and Economic Injury Disaster Loan Program (EIDL). She has continued to urge the SBA to quickly administer PPP and EIDL loans to Nevada small businesses that have been most impacted by COVID-19.