SBA still plans to review 10,050 grants; auditors flag over 61,000
Summary
In September 2023, SBA's inspector general found the agency had reviewed just 88 Restaurant Revitalization Fund awards in ten months -- and that even after the pace later improved, finishing its planned review of 10,050 awards would take until 2028, past the deadline for keeping the underlying records. More than two years later, SBA's review plan still covers the same 10,050 awards. But the population of awards auditors say lack sufficient documentation to even confirm eligibility has grown to more than 61,000 -- roughly six times the number SBA plans to check. The inspector general's December 2025 report puts the money now at risk of never being recovered at over $9.5 billion, about a third of the entire $28.6 billion Congress authorized for the program.
A review that was already too slow, in 2023
The American Rescue Plan Act authorized to distribute the $28.6 billion RRF program to small restaurants and bars. To catch ineligible or fraudulent awards after the fact, SBA's inspector general reported in September 2023⧉ that the agency had selected 10,050 of the program's 100,571 total awards -- 10 percent -- for manual post-award review. As of late October 2022, fewer than 1 percent of those 10,050 had actually been reviewed; it had taken the review office about ten months to get through 88 awards, with a best month of 26.
By August 2023, the pace had picked up to over 1,400 reviews completed -- about 14 percent of the plan. Even at that improved rate, projected it would take nearly five more years, until May 2028, to finish. That timeline mattered because RRF recipients were only required to keep their award records for three years, while had six years to recover improper payments and five to pursue fraud -- a gap that risked the review outrunning the paper trail it needed.
View data as table
| As of Oct. 2022 | 88 |
|---|---|
| As of Aug. 2023 | 1,400 |
The same 2023 report found more than 20,000 recipients, holding $3.5 billion in awards, had not filed any of the reports the program required, and that $39 million sat with recipients who were never supposed to receive it, with no recovery action underway. made six recommendations to fix the review process and start recovering money; agreed with three, partially agreed with two, and disagreed with one.
Two years later: the same review plan, a much bigger problem
's RRF and Shuttered Venue Operators Grant programs both let applicants self-certify their own eligibility -- attesting to their industry and operational status without independent verification, a design says leaves both programs open to fraud or misuse. OIG's December 2025 report on SBA's top management challenges⧉ found the agency still had not resolved multiple recommendations to review billions in RRF awards. does now plan to start recovering improper RRF payments in fiscal year 2026 -- but its review still covers only 10,050 awards, the same number set in 2023, even though now identifies more than 61,000 awards that lack sufficient documentation to determine whether the recipient was even eligible.
View data as table
| Awards SBA plans to review | 10,050 |
|---|---|
| Awards OIG says lack sufficient documentation | 61,000 |
Some of the underlying problems from 2023 persist unresolved. As of July 2025, 9.4 percent of all RRF recipients -- awards worth $1.5 billion -- still had not filed the final use-of-funds report that was due in April 2023, more than two years earlier. also found had not reviewed all the awards flagged as potentially fraudulent or ineligible, despite having originally planned to. And the structural risk warned about in 2023 -- a three-year record-retention requirement against a five-year statute of limitations for RRF and SVOG fraud prosecution -- remains in the 2025 report largely as first described it.
View data as table
| June 2023 | 3.5 |
|---|---|
| July 2025 | 1.5 |
The takeaway
- The review plan didn't grow with the problem it was meant to catch. set out to review 10,050 awards in 2023 and still plans to review 10,050 today -- while the population says lacks documentation to confirm eligibility grew to over 61,000, about six times the review's scope.
- A structural risk flagged in 2023 is still on the table in 2025. RRF recipients only have to keep award records for three years; has five to six years to prosecute fraud or recover money. warned in 2023 that a slow review could outrun that retention window, and its 2025 report describes the same mismatch, still unresolved.
- Not every number got worse. The dollar value of awards tied to recipients who hadn't filed a required report fell from $3.5 billion in June 2023 to $1.5 billion in July 2025 -- real progress, even as the review-scope and documentation-gap numbers moved in the other direction.
Figures on the original review plan, its pace, and the 2023 findings are from Report 23-15 (September 29, 2023). Figures on the current flagged-award population, the FY2026 recovery plan, and the July 2025 unfiled-report status are from Report 26-01 (December 18, 2025), a broader management-challenges report that cites Report 23-15 and related audits rather than presenting new independent fieldwork of its own on every figure. The $9.5 billion figure is 's own estimate of potentially improper payments risks failing to recoup, not a confirmed loss; the 61,000-award figure describes awards lacking sufficient documentation to determine eligibility, not confirmed ineligibility or fraud.
Sources(2) ▾
- U.S. Small Business Administration, Office of Inspector General, Top Management and Performance Challenges Facing the Small Business Administration in Fiscal Year 2026 (Report 26-01) (2025-12-18) — The 61,000 flagged-award / 10,050 planned-review gap, the $9.5B at-risk estimate, the July 2025 unfiled-report figure, the incomplete review of fraud-flagged awards, the FY2026 recovery-process plan, and the record-retention/statute-of-limitations mismatch sba.gov · original document
- U.S. Small Business Administration, Office of Inspector General, SBA's Oversight of Restaurant Revitalization Fund Recipients (Report 23-15) (2023-09-29) — The $28.6B RRF authorization, the original 10,050-of-100,571 review plan, the review-pace timeline (88 awards in 10 months, 1,400 by August 2023), the 5-years-until-2028 projection, the 3-year record-retention vs. 5-6-year recovery/prosecution window, the 2023 unfiled-report and unrecovered-funds figures, and the six recommendations oversight.gov · original document
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The Restaurant Revitalization Fund paid out $28.6 billion to pandemic-battered restaurants and bars starting in 2021. Two inspector general reports, filed more than two years apart, trace the same problem at two different stages: a post-award review process that was too slow to keep up with its own caseload in 2023, and a caseload that has since grown far faster than the review process ever did. The number of awards plans to check by hand hasn't moved. The number auditors say need checking has grown sixfold.