By RON NIXON and LESLIE EATON
Published: February 27, 2007
Last September, the Small Business Administration, which provides most long-term rebuilding aid to disaster victims, accelerated its lending to homeowners and businesses in the Gulf Coast, responding to criticism that it had been slow to respond to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita of 2005.
Snip...
Leaders of the House and Senate committees overseeing the agency said they were concerned about the accusations of improper lending.
“I’m worried that there may have been too much of a focus on quotas over quality of service for disaster victims,” Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts and chairman of the Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, said in a statement.
“And if that’s true, it’s unacceptable,” Mr. Kerry said. “If in a rush to get paperwork off their desks the S.B.A. shifted the burden to borrowers who have lost everything to Katrina, that’s not a policy, that’s an abdication of responsibility.”
Despite the agency’s new emphasis on speeding the lending process, disaster victims say they continue to experience problems. Donna Colosino, whose family owns a small company in Louisiana that sells power generation equipment, told the House Small Business Committee earlier this month that more than 20 loan officers had dealt with her case. And she said she sent the same documents to the agency more than a dozen times.
link