Bank of America sent 184,000 Payroll Protection Applications to the Small Business Administration on behalf of clients, according to a letter the bank shared with CNN Business.

Yet the SBA has only approved 1,000 of those loans so far, according to a bank spokesperson who declined to provide any further comment on the rate of approval.

Although the SBA said it does not comment on individual lender operations, a senior administration official defended the agency by citing the number of applications approved across all lenders.

The SBA has approved over 500,000 loans valued at over $55 billion as of Tuesday afternoon, the official told CNN Business.

“To keep our clients informed and up to date, we have sent over 10 million emails to them,” wrote Dean Athanasia, president of Consumer and Small Business at Bank of America, in a memo to his senior leadership staff. “Today, we will communicate to each client whose application has been submitted to the SBA, advising them the loan application has been submitted, and we will notify each client promptly when the SBA has acted on the application. We expect that will take several days at the earliest based on what the SBA is telling us.”

Bank of America has “another 48,000 client applications ready for the SBA,” wrote Athanasia.”On Monday — after a 10-day delay waiting for additional funding from Congress, and then developing the additional guidelines for the program — the SBA began accepting PPP applications again.”

“Since they reopened at 10:30 am on Monday, we have been uploading these to the SBA through their slower, more manual process,” he added.