The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) was designed to soften the financial impact of the pandemic for small businesses. It issued about $800 billion in potentially forgivable government loans to keep workers employed during COVID shutdowns.

Now, the overwhelming majority of those loans have been forgiven with very little scrutiny. That means many loans have been forgiven to businesses that flourished during the pandemic or to fraudsters who took advantage of the lax system.

Meanwhile, the majority of the loans that remain unforgiven belong to the smallest businesses, companies the program was most meant to help.

Sacha Pfeiffer and Austin Fast of NPR's Investigations team looked into how the program failed to be as stringent as the government promised.

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