By Ken Newton; St. Joe News Press

The Alamo stands as a symbol of defiance in a fight for independence. Thanks to lax oversight, it would also stand as a business address for a taxpayer-funded federal loan.

This came to light Wednesday afternoon as an auditor of Small Business Administration programs testified before a Congressional committee. The top Republican on the panel, Northwest Missouri Rep. Sam Graves, cited frustration with the continuing fraud found in government efforts to help small businesses.

“The SBA does not seem to take an aggressive approach to fixing the problems identified by Congress, the GAO, and the inspector general,” said Mr. Graves at a hearing of the House Small Business Committee. “Instead, it spends scarce resources studying these problems.”

While the Capitol Hill hearing featured SBA administrator Karen Mills, some telling testimony came from Gregory Kutz, a forensic audits and investigations manager for the Government Accountability Office.

His statement to the committee talked of bogus applications sent to the SBA’s Historically Underutilized Business Zone program, known as HUBZone, from fake businesses located at the Alamo in San Antonio, a Florida storage unit and a city hall in a Texas town.

All were approved for funding.

“The SBA’s failure to verify principal office locations, even through a simple Internet search, leaves the program vulnerable to firms misrepresenting their eligibility, preventing program benefits from going to intended targets,” Mr. Kutz’s statement said.

An additional review of records, the manager said, showed a construction company that had previously been caught misrepresenting its program eligibility getting $600,000 in new non-competitive contracts and another $10 million in federal stimulus contracts.

Ms. Mills told the committee the SBA has worked to strengthen its certification process, its monitoring of loans and its pursuit of offenders. “An environment of integrity across all of our contracting programs is crucial,” she said. “The president included more funds in SBA’s proposed budget exactly for this purpose.”

Mr. Graves remained skeptical.

“If it is incapable of taking necessary corrective action, then it might be time to examine whether a complete overhaul of the SBA is needed to separate its regulatory functions from its mission to promote small businesses,” he said.