PRA SBA Form 994 Non-Substantive Changes Memo to OMB v1 to V2 (2025.07)

U.S. Small Business Administration

Washington, D.C. 20416

Date: July 21, 2025

To: Susan Minson

SBA Desk Officer

Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA)

Office of Management and Budget (OMB)

From: Kevin Valdes, on behalf of Jermaine Perry

Office of Surety Guarantees

Subject: Urgent PRA Non-Substantive Change Request for OMB Control #3245-0007

OMB Approval Date: 07/23/2024; Expiration Date: 07/31/2027

SBA’s Office of Surety Guarantees (OSG) requests urgent approval of non-substantive and/or technical changes to the architecture of an approved information collection, SBA Form 994, Application for Surety Bond Guarantee Assistance. These non-substantive changes address issues identified by users since the last updated version (v1.0) OMB approved on July 23, 2024.

Justification for changes to original submission

The urgency for OMB approval is to allow SBA to publish to its website the improved version (v2.0) of SBA Form 994 and provide to small businesses and surety bond companies for immediate use in applying to SBA’s Surety Bond Guarantee (SBG) program. SBA analysts, specialists, and surety bond company users have identified several minor revisions needed to the SBA Form 994, largely in the areas of field language, clarifying instructions, and formatting to prevent incorrect submissions by surety bond companies and small businesses. Refinement in v2.0 is largely technical or cosmetic: Field entries not clearly visible when completing the form, and instruction and field language lacking clarity when a submitter is identifying the information being requested for the form. The field “Project Type” was modified to include “Manufacturing” as a response option instead of requiring the submitter to manually write in this response. Correcting a section to include “is not” options for completion of the section. Elaborations of instructions in Part V for clarity. Several field formatting and title corrections for clarity.

Circumstances necessitating the collection of information restated.

No substantive changes were made to the information collection as approved by OMB, and there is no impact on burden hours associated with v2.0 of SBA Form 994.

Under separate cover and via email from [email protected], OMB will receive a marked up file of non-substantive and/or technical changes to the SBA Form 994 v1.0 to v2.0.

If you have any questions concerning this memorandum, please contact me via email at [email protected] or by phone (202) 816-0137.