Westminster accounting firm sues major banks over allegedly withholding PPP fees

WESTMINSTER — A Westminster accounting firm is suing some of the largest banks in the country and Colorado, including JP Morgan Chase & Co. (NYSE: JPM), Bank of America Corp. (NYSE: BAC), Wells Fargo & Co. (NYSE: WFC) and Vectra Bank Colorado, claiming the lenders are withholding fees to consulting firms that aided small businesses in applying for the Paycheck Protection Program.

In the complaint filed Tuesday to the U.S. District Court of Colorado, Impacct LLC claims that it did not charge fees to its client companies that it helped to apply for the PPP funding based on its reading of the CARES Act, but rather expected that banks that distributed the loans would share the $20 billion in fees they received from the government for originating the loans.

The language in the CARES Act instructs lenders to give Impacct and other similar agents a 1% cut of any loan under $350,000, a half-percent fee for loans between $350,000 and $2 million, and a quarter-percent fee for loans over $2 million.

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Impacct claims that banks it is suing either pocketed all of the fees it was supposed to give to agents such as the accounting firm and others that aided companies in applying for PPP dollars, or offered half of what the bill says is owed to them.

Impacct’s lawsuit seeks to form a class of other agents that prepared PPP loan applications and require the lenders to pay out any fees owed to them, along with legal fees and additional judgments as deemed necessary.

Other banks named in the suit include KeyCorp. (NYSE: KEY), Bank of Oklahoma (Nasdaq: BOKF), Zions Bancorporation (Nasdaq: ZION) and Midwest Regional Bank.

Representatives for Bank of America, KeyBank and JPMorgan Chase declined to comment, while a representative for Wells Fargo declined to comment but said the bank will donate any origination fees it receives from the government.

The other lenders named in the suit did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday.