Walmart is the world’s largest corporation measured by revenues, but that didn’t keep the retail giant from banking hundreds of millions of tax dollars in government programs designed to help Main Street shops because anti-fraud measures were so poor at the Small Business Administration (SBA), a Senate hearing will be told Wednesday.

“Across the country, we see SBA lending flowing to organizations that most Americans would never consider ‘small.’ Walmart — the largest company in the world by revenue — has received SBA-backed loans. So have Fortune 500 firms, Rolex stores, Napa wineries, luxury spas, and plastic surgery centers. These aren’t the Mom-and-Pop shops Congress intended to support,” Open the Books (OTB) President John Hart is set to testify before the Senate Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee during a Wednesday afternoon hearing entitled “Running Government Like a Small Business: Cut Waste, Smash Fraud.”

“Since 2023, our auditors found more than $105 million in SBA loans to private country clubs, beach clubs, tennis and racquet clubs, and yacht clubs — nearly half in 2025 alone. Another $11.8 billion went to highly capitalized investment funds and venture finance firms — aid to Wall Street, not Main Street,” Hart continued.

Hart’s testimony and that of other witnesses were posted in advance on the Senate panel’s website Tuesday.

Hart’s organization is an Illinois-based nonprofit government watchdog that has assembled the largest public database in history using public information laws, covering expenditures at the federal, state, and major municipal levels across the country.

But SBA funds going to Fortune 500 giants like Walmart is far from the only illustration of why federal mismanagement at the agency has lost an estimated $2 trillion in recent years, with most of that disappearing during former President Joe Biden’s Oval Office tenure via programs he pushed Congress to adopt in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021 and thereafter.

Veteran investigative reporter Luke Rosiak pointed to what he called “the most openly abused and shockingly corrupt program in the federal government,” contract set-asides. The programs were created under President Jimmy Carter in 1978 to help historically disadvantaged black-owned businesses. The SBA has operated 8(a) set-aside programs across the government ever since, and as much as 5% of all federal contracting is awarded through such initiatives.

“But these billions don’t go to poor minorities in your states. They go to insiders in the suburbs of D.C., which are already the wealthiest counties in the country. Very little goes to black Americans,” Rosiak testified. “The racial composition of America is more complex than in 1978. In the case of first-generation immigrants, this means the policy of the U.S. government is to prioritize foreigners over Americans. By one measure, South Asians, from the country of India, gobble up a lion’s share of 8(a) contracts, while black Americans get only 15 percent.”

As an example, Rosiak said he randomly found a Northern Virginia-based firm, OCT Consulting, that, according to USASpending.gov has received 19 information technology (IT) set-aside (8)a contracts from 10 federal departments and agencies since 2017, all non-competitively awarded. Atul Kathuria is the founder and chief executive officer of OCT Consulting, according to the firm’s website.

To all appearances, Kathuria doesn’t match the originating intended ethnic profile of set-aside contract awardees, Rosiak said, noting that “a listing of D.C.’s most expensive real estate transactions shows that earlier this year, Atul bought an 11,000-square foot estate, replete with a wine cellar, for $7 million. … What did Atul do before he became a disadvantaged businessman and overcame all odds to become a millionaire? He went to George Washington University and worked for 15 years as a financial consultant at Ernst and Young and Booz Allen Hamilton.”

In addition to loans meant for Mom-and-Pop Main Street operations going to Walmart and well-connected government insiders in the prosperous suburbs of the nation’s capital, Hart will describe the depth of the corruption in other SBA programs.

“Fraud and improper payments compound the problem. During the pandemic, the SBA issued forgivable Paycheck Protection Program loans to 57,000 entities on Treasury’s Do Not Pay List — a failure that better interagency communication and modernized data systems could have prevented. Major law firms and accounting firms received $1.4 billion, despite showing little or no financial hardship,” Hart will testify.

“Age-related fraud also flourished. In 2021-22, SBA issued 5,593 loans worth $312 million to businesses whose listed owners were 11 years old or younger, and 3,095 loans worth $333 million went to borrowers aged 115 or older — that’s $645 million in questionable loans in just two years,” the OTB head will attest.

Other witnesses scheduled to appear Wednesday include Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette, vice president of Policy and Government Affairs for the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), a liberal non-profit government watchdog, and Dr. Courtney LaFountain, acting director for Financial Markets and Community Investment at the Government Accountability Office (GAO). The Senate panel’s chairman is Senator Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) and the Ranking Member is Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass.).