I recently heard an SBA lender on an old webinar insinuate that most gifts of funds used for the cash injection or equity in an SBA backed loan are actually informal interest-free loans from family members. Is that true? Is this an unspoken acceptable practice?

I understand that the language of a typical SBA gift letter only states that "repayment of the gift funds is not required", which doesn't explicitly state that the gift funds can't be returned at a future date months or years after the SBA loan is closed or even paid off.

The SBA's intention of the use of gift funds for equity is clearly that the gift is an actual gift with no strings attached, but does the SBA view returning or repaying the gift as fraud? I'm inclined to think that this would be considered fraud or at a minimum misleading to the SBA.

I believe nobody in our community wants to willfully or inadvertently commit fraud, so I'm curious to hear what our lending practitioners in the industry have to say about this topic and I hope that a helpful discussion can happen.