Fraud aside, which is a problem, the "forgiveness" of the loans was the plan all along so it's not as if businesses were expected to pay them back.

The program was really a bailout so businesses could maintain their payrolls when everything was shutdown. Instead of writing the checks directly, the government decided to frame it as a loan that would be forgiven if businesses stayed in business and spent it on their payrolls. This was a good strategy for the government, because it would have been pretty tough to enforce otherwise.

So the loan forgiveness was by _design_ and the point of the program was to keep businesses alive when the governments themselves were (for perhaps good reason) making it impossible for them to operate. It's not really "forgiveness" in the sense of, say, the college loan forgiveness program.