It might seem that the banking sector’s bailout saga is nearing its close, leaving room to focus on other catastrophes like the European debt crisis or the Gulf oil spill, but some small banks across the country that benefited from TARP are still struggling to stay afloat, and many more will likely fail.

And while the Treasury Department and the Obama Administration have justifiably lauded TARP for preventing another catastrophic bank failure, the fact that hundreds of smaller TARP recipients are missing their dividend payments suggests that these banks should never have received government money to begin with.

Illinois-based Midwest Bank was the fourth, and latest, TARP recipient to fail on May 14, bringing the total taxpayer loss for the failures to over $2.6 billion. The FDIC stated in its quarterly banking profile last week that its list of problem banks had grown to 775 from 702 at the start of this year. And the office of the Special Inspector General for TARP (SIGTARP) reported in April that 104 TARP banks have missed at least one, and in some cases, several, dividend payments to the U.S. Treasury.

One bank, Saigon National of California, is dangerously close to missing six dividend payments, which would give the Treasury department the right to elect two directors to the bank’s board. Roy Painter, Saigon’s chief financial officer, explained to Fortune that the bank has not paid its TARP dividends because it has not received approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) to make the payments. While Painter declined to explain why the OCC has not granted approval, it is likely because Saigon, like the hundreds of other small TARP recipients, lacks sufficient capital.

Read More: – By Scott Olster, Fortune