Prohibiting Individuals Convicted of Defrauding the Government From Receiving Any Assistance From the Small Business Administration

Floor Speech

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Mr. MFUME. Mr. Speaker, my thanks to Chairman Williams and to the ranking member, Ms. Velazquez of New York for their leadership. She and I were having a conversation reminding ourselves that 84 percent of all of the loosening of the guardrails that created the problems occurred while the previous administration was in office. It is important for the facts to be noted in that regard. It is not in an effort to cast aspersions, but it is in an effort to make sure we tell the truth.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today like the gentleman from Texas and the gentlewoman from New York in support of H.R. 5427 which prohibits, as you have heard, individuals convicted of defrauding small business pandemic relief programs from receiving future non-disaster financial aid assistance from the administration.

It sounds like it is common sense to me. If you put your hand in the cookie jar and you steal the cookies, why should you be rewarded later for that?

To this day, our Nation has to reckon with the fact that the consequences of that decision in 2020 to fast-track the allocation of the pandemic relief funds by weakening and removing the internal controls really caused the problems. It was a recipe for disaster.

Are we even astonished that something like this would happen?

This is why so many of us argued against this in 2020.

While many of these antifraud controls are being reinstituted by the Small Business Administration, fraud in these programs has run rampant. We let the horse out of the barn and are wasting time looking at it instead of trying to find a way to get it back in. So that is what this measure does in many respects.

As the ranking member of the Small Business Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations, and Regulations, I have been, like many of my colleagues on the committee, incredibly concerned by the misuse and the abuse of pandemic relief funds.

Why?

It is a very simple answer: These funds could have been used to protect jobs. They could have been used to lift small businesses out of financial distress as they should have, and they could have created a circular flow of income in so many communities, urban and rural, throughout this country.

Instead, they lined the pockets of thieves and fraudsters. So that is why I am pleased to be the Democratic co-lead on this along with Mr. Williams.

This bill amends section 16 of the SBA Act to prohibit, as we said before, anyone convicted of crimes related to financial misconduct or making false statements with respect to small business pandemic relief moneys from not being able to receive nondisaster financial assistance in the future. It is kind of common sense. It really is.

So this bill ensures that those who knowingly and willfully stole Federal funds are not given a similar opportunity in the future.

Mr. Speaker, I, again, thank the ranking member, Ms. Velazquez of New York; the chair, Mr. Williams of Texas; Mr. Bean of Florida; and others on both sides of the aisle for working to make sure that this bill has the support it needs.

Mr. Speaker, I urge all of my colleagues later today to be able to stand up and to vote for it.

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