25. Small Business Administration · Minor
Require SBA performance metrics and program-integrity procedures
Printed page 751 25. Small Business Administration
“Require performance metrics and internal procedures to safeguard taxpayer dollars and program integrity.”
What has happened
- Partially done
The FY2025 Annual Performance Report records new integrity measures baselined in FY2025: percent of novel financial statement audit recommendations (8.9% against a 15% FY2026 target), percent reduction in repeat financial statement audit recommendations (67.9% against a 25% target), and the recovery rate on COVID-EIDL and PPP debt referred to Treasury (0.3%). They sit on a new executive audit remediation strategy and an enterprise-wide governance, risk and compliance tool. Not `done`: SBA Inspector General Report 25-25 finds the strategy "could result in a clean audit opinion" but that the agency "can further enhance its implementation to obtain a clean audit", and the agency still has open material weaknesses.
- Partially done
And the agency rejects the measurement half of the ask where the Inspector General presses it. Responding in the same Agency Financial Report to the OIG's Most Serious Management Challenges, SBA writes that the OIG "suggested remediation that would establish performance goals and measuring progress, yet these actions are not supported by statute in the Small Business Act, by the Agency's regulations, or by Office of Management and Budget's (OMB) guidance. Furthermore, the OIG's recommendations are not practicable nor are they funded." It offers its own substitute — "expanded analytics and modern reporting dashboards", oversight of Small Business Development Centers "reinstated after years" — and on the integrity limb reports real, dated procedures: "a comprehensive fraud risk framework spanning account registration, application processing, and pre-distribution screening", including "citizenship and birth date verifications for 7(a) and 504 loan applications". So the ask's two limbs part company: internal procedures to safeguard taxpayer dollars are being built, and required performance metrics are being argued about. `partial` on both counts.
- Partially done
The FY2025 audit result, which is what would have carried this to `done` and does not. KPMG LLP, engaged by the Inspector General, issued a **disclaimer of opinion** on the SBA's consolidated balance sheet as at 2025-09-30: "We do not express an opinion on the accompanying consolidated financial statement of the SBA. Because of the significance of the matter described in the Basis for Disclaimer of Opinion section of our report, we have not been able to obtain sufficient appropriate audit evidence to provide a basis for an audit opinion." The basis is the pandemic programs — PPP, COVID-EIDL, RRF and SVOG — where "management was still in the process of designing and implementing corrective actions" and could not "provide relevant and reliable information to support a significant number of transactions and account balances". Four material weaknesses remain and the auditors found SBA not in substantial compliance with the Federal Financial Management Improvement Act. The picture is not uniformly bad: the Inspector General records "considerable progress", with two material weaknesses remediated (general information-technology controls; evaluation of service organizations) and one downgraded, and the agency says it will "develop a refreshed financial statement audit remediation strategy" in FY2026 toward "achieving a clean audit opinion". But on the Quote's own terms this is a fifth consecutive year without an opinion, and the agency's own scorecard confirms it: of the three Mission Support performance measures printed in the report, the Inspector General Maturity Rating came in at **2.72 against a goal of 3.8**.
- Partially done
The reorganization centralized risk management and fraud prevention inside the Office of the Chief Financial Officer, in terms, "in the effort to restore integrity to agency programs, audits, and financial statements" — the internal program-integrity procedures the Quote asks for, put in one place.
Research log
What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence
Research notes
- The SBA has published an Annual Performance Report for years under GPRA, so the bare existence of performance metrics is not the finding. What is new inside the window is a set of measures aimed squarely at program integrity and taxpayer dollars — audit-recommendation churn and Treasury recovery on referred pandemic debt — baselined in FY2025, plus the remediation strategy and compliance tooling behind them. That is the ask’s substance, partially delivered.
- partial and not done because the measures are new enough to have targets but not results (two of the three show “Baseline” for FY2025) and the financial statements still carry material weaknesses.
Read-queue ticket 07, 2026-09-06. The row asked whether the agency obtained a clean FY2025 audit
opinion, which would have pushed this toward done. It did not: the FY2025 Agency Financial Report
carries a disclaimer of opinion. Two routes worth recording, because the earlier sweep found neither
document. The Agency Financial Report is at
legacy.sba.gov/document/report-agency-financial-report (the PDF under
legacy.sba.gov/sites/default/files/2026-02/), 215 pages, 9,783 lines of extracted text, and it
reprints the auditors’ report, the Inspector General’s transmittal, the Most Serious Management
Challenges and the agency’s response, all in one file. The 2025 Annual Report the January release
promised is a separate and much thinner thing — 48 pages produced in Canva, at sba.gov/annual-report/
on the new site (which is why it is missing from legacy.sba.gov’s 14,836-URL sitemap), with the
PDF on cdn.www.sba.gov. It contains three occurrences of the word “audit” and no discussion of the
FY2025 audit result at all, so it is not evidence about this ask in either direction.
- Action
- create
- Object
- SBA performance metrics and internal program-integrity procedures
- ID
- 2038