Corrections and right of reply

This site publishes default rates about named lenders, CDCs and franchise brands. That obliges us to be correctable, and to say in advance exactly how.

If you think a figure is wrong

Write to corrections@sbadecoded.com with the page and the figure. A person reads it. We will re-run it against the source file and publish the outcome either way — including when we were right. Corrections are marked on the page with the date and what changed, not quietly edited.

If you are the business being described

Any lender, CDC or franchisor may submit a response for publication on its own page. We publish it unedited, alongside the data, with attribution. You do not need our agreement to disagree with us.

What we will not do is remove accurate figures derived from public federal records. If the underlying SBA data is wrong, the correction has to come from SBA — tell us and we will note the dispute on the page while it is resolved.

What we already do to avoid being wrong

Floors

Nothing thin gets published

A franchise brand needs 30 loans old enough to judge; a lender needs 50 in five years. Below that the number is noise and no page exists.

Vintages

Loans are never pooled across years

Charge-offs surface three to five years after approval, so anyone growing quickly looks artificially clean on an all-time average.

Names

Brand spellings are merged by hand

A curated alias list, with a documented do-not-merge list. Holiday Inn and Holiday Inn Express are deliberately kept apart.

Sample

Every rate shows what it was computed from

Loan counts, release date and method sit beside the figure, so a rate built on 30 loans is visibly weaker than one built on 400.

Privacy

Named only when the loan failed

The federal files carry every borrower's name and address. We name the businesses whose SBA loans were charged off, with city and loss; we omit street addresses and publish nothing about borrowers whose loans are current or fully repaid.

Change log

dated, not quietly edited

Date	What changed
2026-07-30	Method change. Franchise, industry and state default rates are now counted by loan — charged-off loans divided by the loans old enough to judge — rather than dollar-weighted, so each headline percentage equals the plain count shown on the page. Every affected page was recomputed.
2026-07-30	Disclosure. The Experimac page now states the brand rebranded to Experimax; loans under the new name are recorded separately in the federal file. Counted together the brand’s record is 44 of 74 charged off (59.5%).
2026-06-30	Data release. All figures rebuilt from the SBA 7(a) and 504 FOIA release dated 2026-06-30.

Material corrections and method changes are logged here with the date. We do not silently edit figures.