The SBA officially opened its forgiveness portal on 8/10/2020, and there has been a lot of buzz about getting the forgiveness application process started. You may be asking yourself, "why ACCU has opted to delay opening its forgiveness portal?" Well, the short answer is: "we are delaying opening our forgiveness portal for the benefit of the majority of our members." Please keep reading to hear our plans for accepting your forgiveness application and how this delay might work in your favor
1. Proposed legislation on automatic forgiveness
We continue to closely monitor proposed legislation that would provide automatic forgiveness for loans not exceeding $150,000. This rule change would impact the majority of our borrowers and significantly reduce the burden on our members.
2. The SBA opened its portal, but the pathway to complete forgiveness is still unclear.
Although we understand the SBA's forgiveness portal is currently open, and you are eager to have your PPP loan forgiven (we are keen to provide you that good news too), the SBA has 90 days to respond to applications. So, unsurprisingly for many of the technology portal providers, we work closely with, they have not yet returned a decision to applications submitted to date. Whether the SBA will move expeditiously or are using the early submissions as test cases is unclear. However, it appears the rules are still not quite set in stone yet.
3. The development of a streamlined and straightforward processing portal
As per the previous point, the PPP forgiveness rules have continued to evolve. We strive to ensure that your forgiveness process is as smooth as possible for you as an applicant. To accomplish this, we want to ensure that rules are finalized and fully understood (likely in line with many other financial institutions' rationale for the delay). We are working closely with many of our key technology partners to develop an automated and straightforward portal. As a Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan recipient, helping you and your organization obtain as much loan forgiveness as possible is our primary objective. To accomplish this in a way that reduces the load on our members, we are carefully seeking a complete understanding of the SBA rules to complete our streamlined process.
Portal go-live date & processing order
Our planned go-live date for a custom online process/portal for PPP Loan forgiveness is expected to open before the end of September 2020 – well before any forgiveness application deadline or payments are due. This portal functionality will be similar to how you originally applied for the PPP loan with ACCU. We do, however, anticipate following the first-in-first-out order when processing forgiveness applications.