Are you having problems with the Small Business Administration and rudeness of some SBA representatives with the Economic Injury Disaster Loan Program? In running Zennie62Media, I certainly am. I think they bank on the idea that you’re not going to complain about their behavior if you want help, but forget that. This is a complaint.
Last year I applied for an EIDL under the Trump Administration during the Pandemic. My Delaware C-Corp received a $20,000 loan, even though that was not enough given the needs of the firm. So the request for an adjustment was submitted, and then the SBA EIDL did not grant that without a stated reason – but invited me to apply for what’s called a “reconsideration.”
That request has not been responded to by SBA, and since October of 2020, I have put out email after email to inquire what is going on, and now I get to what seems to be the reason: the Small Business Administration reps are looking at the applications as personal and not corporate, when Zennie62Media is a Delaware C-Corporation with the appropriate designations that show such status, and with a separate credit rating from me as its CEO. It’s unbelievable that the SBA would do that, but they did, and I learned that, today.
When I called the SBA today, and for the umpteenth time, I gave the phone machine the SBA application number of and, the recording came back “as of Monday May 17th, the money you requested has been deposited in your account.” Interestingly, I never received an email of any approved extension of any loan adjustment, as I originally requested last fall.
So, when after that recording, I finally talked to a person, named Monet, who was really rude and never listened to me, from the start. She told me that my social security number was used to evaluate the credit for the firm, Zennie62Media, Inc – and not the firm’s EIN number, even though she had the EIN number and read it off to me! Plus, Zennie62Media, Inc is a separate entity from me as a person and with its own set of standard credit check systems.
So, Zennie62Media is not me, I own most of it, yet I learned from Monet and another SBA person named Angela, that they don’t see it that way and TOLD me in a YELLING fashion that they did not have supervisors for me to talk to, and I had to sent an email to give them the Zennie62Media information. In all, they were not willing to help; I had to coax them to address my questions. And it seemed like I called Monet’s SBA – where she made up her own rules. Why were they so unwilling to assist me? And I mean from the start of the call.
All of this happened today and after I don’t know how many calls and emails. I am simply trying to get a loan increase for Zennie62Media under the new rules established by the Biden Administration after April 7th 2021 – the SBA told me about that, to start with.
This has to be fixed. It seems to me that the Biden Administration’s program is being hampered from within the SBA itself. You have representatives that do not seem to know that a C-corporation is not a person and how to ask for the right information. Instead Monet and Angela went about looking at me, even though the application has been for the company I am majority owner of.
That’s totally crazy, wrong, and a lot of other things. The SBA must fix this. If the SBA reps don’t know how to look at a business separately, they could wind up accusing people like myself of doing something I did not do. Given how black people are all-too-often mischaracterized, even by other African Americans, that’s something, that kind of discrimination, the Small Business Administration should work to stop.
Stay tuned.