Rusk County Economic Development Corporation

Updates on EIDL and PPP

FROM THE SBDC…

SBA EIDL Loans

As of 5 pm today the SBA is still only accepting SBA EIDL program applications from agricultural related businesses (farmers). If you are a farmer and have not submitted an application, it is recommended you do it as soon as possible. While it can’t be said for sure, it would be suspected the EIDL application process will soon be reopened for all businesses and the pool of money is limited.

PPP Loan Forgiveness and Employee Rehire Attempt Clarification

Yesterday the SBA and Treasury clarified that “a PPP loan forgiveness amount will still be forgiven if the borrower laid off an employee, offered to rehire the same employee, but the employee declined the offer.    SBA and Treasury intend to issue an interim final rule excluding laid-off employees whom the borrower offered to rehire (for the same salary/wages and same number of hours) from the CARES Act’s loan forgiveness reduction calculation. The interim final rule will specify that, to qualify for this exception, the borrower must have made a good faith, written offer of rehire, and the employee’s rejection of that offer must be documented by the borrower. Employees and employers should be aware that employees who reject offers of re-employment may forfeit eligibility for continued unemployment compensation.”    

This is a question that has been asked many times over the last three weeks. The conventional thought and response was you needed to pay at least the same payroll dollars and maintain the same employee count that you indicated when you submitted the PPP loan application even if the employee chose not to come back.  Now it appears from this guidance above that you would not need to do that if you can meet the demonstration test described above. I suspect many of you who got the PPP loans a while back already had to make a decision and may have hired alternate staff to replace the employee that did not return.