Did your organization receive a Shuttered Venue Operators Grant from the Small Business Administration? If so, we have an update on some important deadlines and opportunities for awardees of Shuttered Venue Operators Grants (SVOG).
- Last month, the Small Business Administration (SBA) began issuing Reconsideration 2.0 invitations to those SVOG awardees who fully completed the initial grant application process and, if applicable, the Supplemental Award process.
- Reconsideration 2.0 is an “Actionable Item” that you will find in your SVOG portal and its purpose is to provide ALL awardees an opportunity to correct or update your gross revenue and/or gross earned revenue numbers if you think you should be awarded a larger initial and/or supplemental grant.
- You must answer the actionable item either way if you do or don’t update your financials in order to move to the next steps of “Monitoring, Budgeting, Auditing, and Closeout.”
- Deadlines for completing Reconsideration 2.0 are coming up as early as the week of December 12, 2021, for some recipients.
If you are an awardee who is still awaiting a decision on your Supplemental and you have already been issued an invite to Reconsideration 2.0, then the SBA has determined that your organization is not eligible for a Supplemental. If you believe the SBA made an error, it’s very important that you complete Reconsideration 2.0 and provide new additional and comprehensive evidence and explanations as to why your organization is eligible for a Supplemental Award (equivalent to 50% of your initial award amount.) To be eligible for a Supplemental award, your organization must clearly show through newly uploaded monthly profit & loss statements, tax returns, and/or CPA opinions, that your organization suffered at least a 70% loss in earned revenue, comparing either the first quarter (January, February, March) or second quarter (April, May, June) of 2019 with the same corresponding quarter of 2021.
If you receive only an initial award, please remember to incur 100% of the costs that you plan to cover with SVOG grant funds by the end of your “project period,” which is December 31, 2021. You have longer to execute payment on those costs in 2022 by the end of your “budget period,” but you must incur the cost before the end of this month. (ie – you make a credit card charge for supplies on 12/19/21, but you can appropriately write a check using your SVOG grant funds to pay for the charge after you get the credit card statement in January 2022.)
If you receive an Initial and Supplemental grant award, you can get a six-month extension to June 30, 2022 on your “project period” to allow your organization to incur costs that you plan to cover with SVOG grant funds. However, you must accept the extension offer when you are offered the Supplemental award amount. The “project period” extension offer is also available to initial awardees of $10 million.
If you believe the SBA has given you too large of an SVOG grant award, the best time to address this is in Monitoring and Budgeting. You will have an opportunity to return any surplus of funds.
If you have any questions on grant compliance, allowable uses of funds, etc, now is the opportunity to send your specific questions to the SBA. The SBA has allocated SVOG high level customer service staff to answer your questions. SBA requests that you send your specific questions to svogrant@sba.gov. Additionally, SBA will begin Live Office Hours the week of December 13, 2021. SBA will email SVOG awardees directly with the links.
