There are seven loans that have a negative number of “jobs retained.”

192 loans were given to entities labeled as a sole proprietorship that say they are retaining 500 jobs each. Typically, sole proprietorships are used by the self-employed and hire very few, if any, people. The SBA describes them (pdf) as “very small businesses.”

On 61 loans, the business type is listed as self-employed and the jobs retained figure is 500. There are 16 loans to independent contractors that claim to support 500 jobs.

Conspicuous loan amounts

Similar to employee counts the value of loans based on monthly payroll should have random qualities since it’s determined formulaically. Looking at the last digit of the exact loan amounts (which were only given for loans under 150,000) shows that there is again a bias towards numbers evenly divisible by 10. In fact, 94% of the 4.9 million loans under $150,000 end with the digit zero. Just 624 of the 4.9 million loans had values ending in three, four, six, seven, eight, or nine.

Companies that didn’t apply

Should this data be trusted or company statements? A number of companies that are listed as loan recipients are now denying that they applied or received one. Scooter-sharing company Bird is listed as receiving a loan between $5 million and $10 million, but the company says that’s wrong.

A woman in Wisconsin is listed as receiving a loan between $5 million and $10 million, even though she took out a loan for about $9,300.

Restaurant group Benihana says that it applied for a loan but didn’t accept it (paywall). The data show 24 loans made to entities sharing Benihana’s corporate address in Miami. All of them contain “Benihana” in their name.

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