The SBA Just Hired Palantir to Hunt Down Fraud They Should Have Caught Years Ago

Let this sink in. The Small Business Administration, an agency that shoveled out hundreds of billions of dollars during the pandemic with essentially zero guardrails, has now signed a $300,000 contract with Palantir for something called the "SBA Fraud Prevention Pilot and Bootcamp." A bootcamp. Like they're training for a 5K, except the finish line is finding money that's been gone for five years.

This is not satire. This is a real thing the United States government is doing in 2026. They are paying a surveillance tech company three hundred thousand taxpayer dollars to locate fraud that a moderately curious intern with an Excel spreadsheet could have spotted in 2020. And the pilot is projected to wrap up by April 4. One month. They're giving themselves one month to unravel a fraud catastrophe that spans every state in the country. Incredible.

The Numbers Are Staggering and Nobody Is Laughing

While the SBA was busy rubber-stamping PPP and EIDL applications like they were handing out candy at a parade, the fraud was piling up at a speed that should make every taxpayer physically ill. SBA Administrator Kelly Loeffler recently announced that 6,900 borrowers in Minnesota alone have been suspended across 7,900 PPP and EIDL loans worth approximately $400 million. That's one state. One.

But Minnesota is a rounding error compared to California. In February, the SBA revealed that 111,620 borrowers in California had been suspended for $8.6 billion in suspected pandemic-era fraud. Read that again. One hundred and eleven thousand borrowers. Eight point six billion dollars. From a single state.

And the Palantir contract is supposed to do a state-by-state review to spot suspicious clusters. State by state. In 2026. The pandemic relief programs launched in 2020. That's six years of fraud running completely wild before someone in a government office thought, "Hey, maybe we should look at this by geography." Absolutely breathtaking incompetence.

Meanwhile, the DOJ Is Picking Up the SBA's Scraps

While the SBA is busy onboarding Palantir and presumably ordering catered lunches for their fraud bootcamp, the Department of Justice has been doing the actual work of prosecuting the people who stole this money. Not because the SBA flagged them. Because they were so brazen about it that law enforcement tripped over the evidence.

Take Samer Kammo from Shelby Township. This guy filed for $3 million in PPP loans and just got sentenced to 3 years in prison with $2.5 million in restitution. Three million dollars in fraudulent loans. Did the SBA catch him? No. The SBA was too busy being the SBA.

Then there's Nacole M. Taylor, a tax preparer out of St. Louis who pleaded guilty on March 5, 2026, to wire fraud. Taylor filed $1.2 million in fraudulent PPP and EIDL loan applications and recruited other people to participate in the scheme for kickbacks. A tax preparer. Using her professional knowledge to help others steal from the government and taking a cut. Sentencing is set for June 9. These are the people the SBA let walk right through the front door.

A $300K Band-Aid on a $200 Billion Wound

Let's talk about the absurdity of the dollar amount here. Three hundred thousand dollars. That's what the SBA is spending on Palantir. Do you know what $300,000 is relative to the scale of PPP and EIDL fraud? It's like putting a single Band-Aid on someone who fell into a wood chipper. Estimates of total pandemic relief fraud range from $100 billion to over $200 billion, depending on who you ask. And the SBA's response is a pilot program that costs less than a modest house in most American cities.

Palantir, to their credit, builds genuinely powerful data analytics platforms. They've worked with intelligence agencies, military operations, and financial institutions. They can absolutely find patterns in messy data. The question isn't whether Palantir can do the job. The question is why on earth it took until 2026 for anyone at the SBA to think, "We should probably use technology to look at this." The applications were digital. The bank records were digital. The fraud patterns were obvious enough that Reddit threads in 2020 were pointing them out in real time. But the SBA needed six years and a Palantir bootcamp to get there.

Kelly Loeffler's Fraud Cleanup Tour

SBA Administrator Kelly Loeffler has been making a show of the suspension announcements, rolling them out state by state like a concert tour nobody asked for. Minnesota in late February. California in early February. The Palantir contract sits on top of this as the supposed technological backbone of the effort. The idea is to use Palantir's platform to scan for suspicious clusters of loans, geographic anomalies, and patterns that suggest organized fraud rings.

Which, again, is something that could have been done in 2020. Or 2021. Or literally any year before 2026. The data existed. The tools existed. The political will did not. It is infinitely easier to hand out money than to check where it went. And now, years later, the SBA is playing catch-up while the people who stole millions have long since spent it on luxury cars, real estate, and whatever else you buy when the government accidentally Venmos you a fortune.

The Borrowers Who Didn't Steal Are Still Getting Crushed

Here's the part that should make your blood boil. While the SBA spent half a decade ignoring the massive fraud happening under its nose, legitimate small business owners have been getting hammered with EIDL repayment demands, Treasury offsets on their tax refunds, and collections notices that show up like clockwork. People who took $50,000 to keep their restaurants alive during a global pandemic are being hounded by the same agency that let $8.6 billion in fraud sail through California unchecked.

The suspension numbers in Minnesota and California aren't comforting. They're enraging. Because every one of those 118,000+ suspended borrowers represents money that was stolen from a pool that legitimate businesses needed. Every fraudulent PPP loan was money that didn't go to a real employee's paycheck. Every fake EIDL application was capital that didn't reach a real business on the brink of collapse.

The Bootcamp Nobody Asked For

Let's return to the word "bootcamp" one more time. The SBA's contract with Palantir includes a bootcamp component. They're training SBA staff to use the Palantir platform for fraud detection. Training. In 2026. The agency responsible for disbursing pandemic relief is now learning how to detect fraud in pandemic relief six years after the pandemic started. If there's a more perfect encapsulation of government dysfunction, I'd love to see it.

The legitimate borrowers who are struggling with EIDL repayments didn't get a bootcamp. They didn't get a pilot program. They didn't get $300,000 worth of consultants teaching them how to navigate the SBA's labyrinthine forgiveness process. They got a bill, a deadline, and a threat from Treasury. That's the SBA's two-speed system: glacial when hunting fraud, instantaneous when collecting from the little guy.

So congratulations, Palantir. You've got a month to find patterns in data that's been sitting untouched for six years. And congratulations, SBA. You've finally discovered that fraud exists. Better late than never, except when "never" was always the plan and "late" is just what it looks like when someone finally turns on the lights.