The Small Business Administration has spent over $2.7 billion on information technology since 2010. The result? Systems that crash during critical moments, lose borrower data, generate incorrect documents, and leave customer service representatives unable to help anyone.
This isn't a bug. It's the entire program.
The CAFS Disaster
At the heart of the SBA's IT chaos is CAFS—the Capital Access Financial System. Originally deployed in 2009, CAFS was supposed to modernize loan processing. Instead, it became a case study in government IT failure.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, when the EIDL program launched, CAFS buckled immediately. The system couldn't handle the volume, crashed repeatedly, and lost thousands of applications. Borrowers who applied in April 2020 sometimes didn't get responses until 2022—not because humans were reviewing applications, but because the system literally couldn't process them.
- Original budget: $54 million
- Actual cost to date: $189 million+
- System uptime during EIDL peak: Less than 70%
- Average processing delay: 8-14 months
- Applications lost or corrupted: Unknown (SBA won't say)
The Portal of Despair
Every EIDL borrower knows the SBA portal—and hates it. This online interface was supposed to let borrowers check their loan status, make payments, and communicate with servicers. In practice, it became a source of endless frustration.
Common portal problems include:
- Phantom payments: The portal shows payments as "pending" for weeks, then they disappear entirely
- Incorrect balances: Loan balances that don't match actual payment history
- Document black holes: Uploaded documents that vanish without confirmation
- Login failures: Authentication systems that lock out legitimate users
- Status lies: Applications shown as "processing" that haven't moved in years
"I uploaded my tax returns to the portal 14 times over 18 months. Each time, they 'couldn't find' them. On attempt 15, I got a denial letter saying I failed to provide documentation. The portal showed all 14 uploads."
— Anonymous borrower, California
The Call Center That Can't Help
SBA customer service representatives work with some of the worst tools in government. Their internal systems are so fragmented that a single borrower's information might be spread across 4-5 different databases that don't communicate with each other.
This is why every time you call the SBA, you get different answers. It's not that the representatives are incompetent—it's that they literally cannot see your complete file. They're looking at fragments of data and guessing at the rest.
The SBA's own Inspector General reported in 2023 that customer service systems were "fundamentally inadequate" and that representatives "lacked access to complete borrower information in 67% of sampled cases."
Where Did the Money Go?
The SBA's IT spending breakdown reads like a masterclass in government waste:
- Legacy system maintenance: Over 40% of IT budget goes to keeping ancient systems running
- Contractor markup: Multiple layers of subcontractors, each taking their cut
- Failed modernization projects: At least 3 major system replacements abandoned mid-project
- Security patches: Constant emergency spending to fix vulnerabilities
- Duplicate systems: Different departments running incompatible systems that do the same thing
In 2022, the Government Accountability Office rated the SBA's IT infrastructure as "high risk" for the 16th consecutive year. Nothing has changed.
The Human Cost
Behind every IT failure is a real person whose business and life hung in the balance. When the system crashed in July 2020, thousands of disaster victims waited extra months for relief. When the portal lost documents, borrowers were denied for "missing paperwork" they'd submitted multiple times.
The SBA's technology failures aren't abstract—they're measured in bankruptcies, foreclosures, and destroyed livelihoods. Every "system error" is someone's business dying while they wait for a government that promised to help.
Why Nothing Changes
Government IT projects fail for predictable reasons: bloated requirements, contractor capture, lack of accountability, and congressional funding games that prioritize new projects over fixing existing ones.
The SBA is particularly vulnerable because it's a small agency with a massive mission. When disasters hit, the agency is expected to scale overnight—but IT systems don't work that way. You can't suddenly make a 20-year-old database handle 100x its normal load.
Until someone in power decides to rebuild the SBA's technology infrastructure from scratch—with modern cloud systems, proper testing, and actual accountability—borrowers will continue to suffer. But that would require admitting the current system is broken, and no one wants to do that.
So the cycle continues: another disaster, another surge of applications, another system crash, another generation of small business owners left wondering why the government can build missiles that hit targets from space but can't build a website that works.
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