COVID Loan Tracker, a digital coalition of entrepreneurs across America advocating for the capital needs of small businesses during the coronavirus pandemic, announced findings from its dataset of applications to the Economic Injury Disaster Loan Advance Program (EIDL Advance) that suggest the Small Business Administration has not lived up to its promise to process requests for relief through the program on a first-come, first-served basis.

The findings raise questions about the agency’s internal processes in administering the EIDL Advance program and its lack of transparency in a time when American small businesses are in the direst need of help.

The SBA’s public communications on EIDL Advances state that applications are processed on a first-come, first-served basis. And yet COVID Loan Tracker has identified hundreds of instances in which it appears that certain applications were approved, and advances paid out while others that had been submitted much earlier remained in limbo, without any explanation. For example, data from COVID Loan Tracker’s members show that some advances have been issued for applications submitted on April 15, while other applications submitted as early as the last week in March remain unpaid.

“There may be a logical, acceptable reason that it appears some applications are ‘jumping the line’ to approval and others lag behind. For example, we understand that to administer such an expansive program, the agency must ensure that taxpayer money is being paid out properly and appropriately, and that, to an extent, the complexity of any bureaucratic endeavor can lead to variability in processing times,” said Duncan MacDonald-Korth, co-founder of COVID Loan Tracker. “That said, many of the discrepancies we have seen – some applications are approved while others submitted weeks earlier wait – fall outside of the bounds of run-of-the-mill government inefficiency and speak to the need for the SBA to make their internal processes more transparent to the public and, in particular, to small business owners seeking relief.”

COVID Loan Tracker is asking small business owners to submit their experiences with the EIDL Advance program or other SBA-administered relief programs such as the Paycheck Protection Program to its website,  Doing so adds to the body of knowledge on how effective the federal government has been in helping small businesses sustain themselves and recover from the economic impact of the pandemic.

Since March, COVID Loan Tracker has collected data from 30,000 small businesses that have applied for EIDL Advances. The SBA program provides small businesses experiencing temporary loss of revenue with advances of up to $10,000 that do not need to be repaid.