The government isn’t disclosing who receives aid, leaving it up to individual companies to decide whether to disclose that they obtained loans. That makes a full accounting of the loan program impossible.

“It’s outrageous,” said Amanda Ballantyne, the executive director of Main Street Alliance, an advocacy group for small businesses. She added that there were countless small business owners “who have laid off all their staff, are trying to file for unemployment and will go bankrupt because of the problems with the way this Paycheck Protection Program was designed.”

Applicants for loans do not need to provide evidence that they have been harmed by the pandemic. They simply need to certify that “current economic uncertainty makes this loan request necessary” to support their operations.

Instead of having the Small Business Administration, which is guaranteeing the loans, decide which companies get funding, the process was essentially outsourced to banks. The banks collect fees for each loan they make but don’t have to monitor whether the recipients use the money appropriately.

For small business owners shut out of the program, watching big companies collect loans while their applications languish has been infuriating.

“It has been beyond frustrating,” said Diane Burgio, a single mother who runs a design business in New York City that employs four people. She was one of more than 280,000 applicants who sought, and did not get, a loan from JPMorgan Chase.

The New York Times identified roughly a dozen publicly traded companies that had recently boasted about their access to ample capital — and then applied for and received millions of dollars in the federal loans.