$200BILLION in taxpayer dollars has been stolen from COVID-19 relief program
A staggering $200 BILLION in taxpayers’ money may have been wasted on COVID-19 relief programs, new watchdog report reveals
- Fraudsters allegedly used fake identities to claim money from taxpayers
- The money was handed out by both Donald Trump and Joe Biden
- But the SBA responded to the findings, saying they were inaccurate
The US government handed out about $200 billion to would-be fraudsters who illegally raised bailout funds to weather the economic storm of the Covid-19 pandemic.
This is according to a report The inspector general of the Small Business Administration, the body in charge of administering the payments, published this on Tuesday.
The eye-watering sum is about 17 percent of the $1.2 trillion being distributed by SBA.
The money was set aside to compensate businesses hit by successive COVID-19 lockdowns
The report focuses on two schemes: the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and the Economic Injury Disaster Loans (EIDL).
SBA Inspector General Hannibal “Mike” Ware, who is independent of other SBA officials, said his team is still investigating further misuse of taxpayers’ money and other abuses that occurred during the pandemic.
His research said there could be billions more in fraudulent payments tied to a low-interest disaster loan that would have to be paid back later.
Ware’s report said the total could reach $136 billion in potential fraud in the EIDL program, representing 33 percent of the total money distributed to companies.
For PPP, officials gave a much lower estimate of about $64 billion, representing 8 percent of total funds sent.
It follows an analysis by the Associated Press that found imposters had been passing off the Social Security numbers of dead people or federal prisoners as their own in order to reel in unemployment checks.
They sometimes even collected benefits in multiple states, the report said.
Investigators accuse the US government of failing to provide adequate surveillance during the early stages of the pandemic.
They also allege that they placed too few restrictions on applicants, allowing would-be fraudsters easy access to money fabricated by hard-working Americans.
Joe Biden signed a law in August that extended the statute of limitations for fraud-related crimes
According to official figures, Donald Trump signed on for more than $3 trillion in COVID-related rescue aid
In an October 2020 interim report, Inspector General Ware said that to speed up the process, SBA “lowered the guardrails” or loosened internal controls, significantly increasing the risk of program fraud.
Commenting on its latest findings, the SBA appeared to question his numbers and questioned how it arrived at such an estimate.
The government agency said Ware’s report contains “serious flaws that significantly overestimate fraud and inadvertently lead the public to believe that the work we did together had no significant impact on fraud protection.”
The inspector general’s review found “a high rate of false positives,” or potential fraud cases that were not fraud upon closer inspection, said Bailey DeVries, acting deputy administrator of the SBA.
But DeVries did not mention specific examples in his answer to Ware.
In total, the US government has distributed an estimated $5 trillion in relief funds since the start of the pandemic, across various programs.
DOJ officials have so far charged 2,230 people with fraud related to Covid relief funds.