Good Jobs First Blog

A new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has revealed significant oversight deficiencies in the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and Economic Injury Disaster Loan program (EIDL). This report demonstrates several of the GAO’s concerning discoveries, including incomplete loan reviews, lapses in recordkeeping, and insufficient oversight plans within the Small Business Administration (SBA). These discoveries and ongoing concerns of fraud have compelled the GAO to add the PPP and EIDL its 2021 High-Risk List, which is the agency’s watchlist for “programs and operations that are vulnerable to waste, fraud, abuse, or mismanagement or in need of transformation.”

Good Jobs First's Katie Furtado explains how the organization was able to determine public school districts lost $2.37 billion to corporate tax abatements in fiscal year 2019 -- and that's just what we could confirm. The actual total is much, much greater.

Oversight is not an abstract public relations battle – it can be a matter of life and death for those struggling to stay afloat during the pandemic. For every dollar lost to fraud and every day that aid is delayed, more Americans inch closer to precarity. Efficient, effective, and equitable distribution of relief funds helps ensure that all families can continue to put food on the table. If the Biden administration intends to make “build back better” more than just a campaign slogan, its oversight activity must continue on its current, productive trajectory.

Getting paid wages so low an individual or family must rely on public assistance to make up the difference - even when they work is full time - is bad enough. But a new report shows low-wage workers are also far more likely to encounter dangerous or illegal conditions, like wage theft. So write the authors of a new study, "Wage Inequality and Labor Rights Violations," a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper. I asked one of the report's authors to talk more about the report, which in part relied in part on Violation Tracker to show the linkage between bad pay and poor working conditions, and how little power workers have in these situations.

Your state and local government’s files on economic development subsidies are just that—your files.