What The Coleman Report Found
The Coleman Report’s latest lender benchmarking analysis, based on SBA loan-level data for every Preferred Lender Program and 7(a) General Processing loan approved in FY24, FY25, and the first nine months of FY26, puts a hard number on something most SBA lenders have felt anecdotally for a while: closings are taking longer.
The median 7(a) loan now funds in 21 days from approval to first disbursement, up from 16 days in FY24. This is a 31% increase in two years.
None of this is happening because lenders across the board got slower at their jobs.
This shift can be tied to the most common mix of loans coming through the program: a larger share of today’s 7(a) portfolio consists of business acquisitions, commercial real estate (CRE) loans, construction loans, and larger change-of-ownership transactions than two years ago.
Those loan types require more documentation, more closing conditions, and more third-party work than a standard working-capital loan. This illustrates a clear causation for the industry slow-down: the loans themselves got more complex.
The median 7(a) loan now funds in 21 days from approval to first disbursement, up from 16 days in FY24. This is a 31% increase in two years.
None of this is happening because lenders across the board got slower at their jobs.
This shift can be tied to the most common mix of loans coming through the program: a larger share of today’s 7(a) portfolio consists of business acquisitions, commercial real estate (CRE) loans, construction loans, and larger change-of-ownership transactions than two years ago.
Those loan types require more documentation, more closing conditions, and more third-party work than a standard working-capital loan. This illustrates a clear causation for the industry slow-down: the loans themselves got more complex.
Where Tax Transcript Verification Sits in That Timeline
Loan complexity shows up in a closing timeline as a longer list of conditions that all have to clear before disbursement.
Tax transcript verification requirements are much heavier in the aforementioned loan types that are clogging the system.
Acquisitions and change-of-ownership deals need transcripts on both the buyer and the business being acquired; CRE and construction loans need current transcripts on every guarantor and often on affiliated entities.
What makes transcript verification worth separating from the rest of the closing checklist is that its timeline doesn’t run on the lender’s own process — it runs on the IRS’s.
A request submitted through Form 4506-C is a single transaction: submit, wait. If anything comes back incomplete, blank, or delayed— a return still processing, an extension on file, IRS correspondence backlogs, a name or TIN mismatch — the lender has to resubmit and wait again.
Each additional authorization, correction, or retrieval step can create additional operational work and may extend the closing timeline. On a loan with multiple parties needing transcripts, those cycles can compound.
Form 8821 changes that math structurally.
Because the authorization is standing rather than transactional, a lender who already has an 8821 on file doesn’t resubmit when a return posts late or an extension resolves — the data becomes available through the existing authorization automatically.
Tax transcript verification requirements are much heavier in the aforementioned loan types that are clogging the system.
Acquisitions and change-of-ownership deals need transcripts on both the buyer and the business being acquired; CRE and construction loans need current transcripts on every guarantor and often on affiliated entities.
What makes transcript verification worth separating from the rest of the closing checklist is that its timeline doesn’t run on the lender’s own process — it runs on the IRS’s.
A request submitted through Form 4506-C is a single transaction: submit, wait. If anything comes back incomplete, blank, or delayed— a return still processing, an extension on file, IRS correspondence backlogs, a name or TIN mismatch — the lender has to resubmit and wait again.
Each additional authorization, correction, or retrieval step can create additional operational work and may extend the closing timeline. On a loan with multiple parties needing transcripts, those cycles can compound.
Form 8821 changes that math structurally.
Because the authorization is standing rather than transactional, a lender who already has an 8821 on file doesn’t resubmit when a return posts late or an extension resolves — the data becomes available through the existing authorization automatically.
Coleman Report’s data confirms what a lot of SBA lenders already suspected: the industry isn’t getting slower because of one bad habit — it’s getting slower because the loans themselves have gotten harder to close.
That trend isn’t reversing on its own, since the shift toward acquisitions and larger transactions reflects where the market is, not a temporary blip.
What’s still within a lender’s control is how much of that added complexity turns into added delay on their own files. Tax transcript retrieval, sitting in the closing path of nearly every one of those complex loan types, is one place where the retrieval method itself determines how much time it costs.
That trend isn’t reversing on its own, since the shift toward acquisitions and larger transactions reflects where the market is, not a temporary blip.
What’s still within a lender’s control is how much of that added complexity turns into added delay on their own files. Tax transcript retrieval, sitting in the closing path of nearly every one of those complex loan types, is one place where the retrieval method itself determines how much time it costs.
See how TOD gives lenders continuous, automated access to tax transcript data from origination through the life of the loan.
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