American Rescue Plan: Info for New Hampshire Businesses

• A section by section summary of the bill can be found here.
• The expansion of the Employee Retention Tax Credit program to allow new businesses to receive this credit as well and it will extend the program through the end of the year.
• There are a number of other valuable resources included in this legislation that would enable states, local governments and economic development organizations to develop new tools to help our business community such as: $350 billion in flexible state and local funding to address the impacts of the pandemic, $10 billion for the Small State Business Credit Initiative enabling states to create flexible lending products.
• The Paycheck Protection Program is still scheduled to close on March 31, 2021. Senator Shaheen supports extending the program until the funds are depleted and she is currently looking at ways to address this.
• Guidance has been released to reflect directives by the Biden/Harris Administration. The Administration directed changes to the Paycheck Protection Program on Feb 22, 2021 to expand the program; most notably, Schedule C filers including Schedule C Qualified Joint Ventures can now apply for new PPP loans that are calculated using gross revenue as opposed to payroll. This is only available for new PPP loans and changes cannot be made to disbursed loans. Partners and Partnerships are not included in the revisions. Federal guidance has been released here: PPP Interim Final Rule – Revisions to Loan Amount Calculation and Eligibility (sba.gov).
• Quick note about the EIDL Emergency Advance Grants. The Administration launched a mapping tool for determining if a business is located within an economically distressed area enabling eligibility for additional grant dollars through this program. Currently, only those businesses in the queue from before are being contacted by the SBA via email (be wary of scammers and make sure that the email is coming from a sba.gov account). Just because you received an email from the SBA on this, does not mean that you are automatically eligible for the funds. They are sending emails with instructions on how to request additional funds.

NHADEC will let you know when more guidance comes out, and we’ll get you more information on how to access funding for programs- stay tuned!