Co-ordination of the program and decisions made by the State Growth Department on who qualified for the $15,000 and $4000 grants was scrutinised by parliament's Public Accounts Committee on Tuesday.

Small Business Minister Sarah Courtney said the department had advised the list of recipients could not be made public, though the committee was welcome to receive the information in private.

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"It is the department's strong advice that there is a real potential to cause undue harm though publicly identifying individual grant recipients," she said.

Ms Courtney said this could exacerbate the high levels of stress business owners were already under and provide information on the financial position of a business to its competitors.

Labor finance spokesman David O'Byrne objected to the information being kept confidential, arguing transparency was needed around expenditure of taxpayer funds.

State Growth secretary Kim Evans told the committee 72 per cent of businesses that applied for grants received them.

There were 3995 applications made and 2870 were approved.

Of these, 1335 businesses received $15,000 grants.

When the government provided $6.1 million more to the program, Mr Evans said 1535 other businesses received $4000.

He said more eligible businesses would have received nothing had the department decided to distribute the extra funding in $15,000 grants.

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