Fed Report Finds 75% of $800 Billion Paycheck Protection Program Didn’t Reach Employees
The question founders need to ask themselves is what type of company they want to build.
The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) allows entities to apply for low-interest private loans to pay for their payroll and certain other costs.
What does not make sense is the application for forgiveness was supposed to have the employer prove they used most of the money for payroll.
If those businesses didn’t, they shouldn’t have been given forgiveness.
The idea was that because of the pandemic, small businesses lose customers and then have to make redundancies.
With PPP in place, they do not have to make cuts in human capital.
The other side of the argument is as long as you provide proof that payroll continued throughout without layoffs, it was forgiven. So you could’ve used PPP loans despite never shutting down or even if you went full remote and only worked from home.
Which again, does not make sense. Because if you can continue without any problem, were you eligible for PPP in the first place?
Here is what an employee says:
“I work for an IT company, we actually gained a shit ton of business during Covid. We applied for and received a PPP loan, which was later forgiven. No one saw a dime of that money except the owner.”
As you can imagine, this was a common scenario.
The money that would’ve gone to payroll went out as profit to the bigwig partners who got a windfall. No fraud was involved, but the program effectively sent huge checks to the richest people at the firm.
Now how do employees feel when they see their leaders only think about themselves?
There are shit tons of articles in business magazines that you must put your people first.
However, what is happening in the business world is so far from where it should be.
So the question every founder should ask themselves is:
Do I want to build a company where people think about themselves?
Or a company that everyone wants to give as much as they can to the business?
And believe it or not, it is a top-down approach.
So, if you do not see this attitude within your business, look closer in the mirror.
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