More than $400 billion in COVID aid was lost to fraud or wasted spending under Donald Trump and Joe Biden, a new bombshell report claimed Monday.
An analysis by the Associated Press said fraudsters and criminals have looted billions of taxpayers’ money earmarked to stave off economic collapse during the pandemic.
It estimated that $280 billion in COVID aid funding was lost to fraud, while another $123 billion was wasted or misused.
Both sums are equivalent up to 10 percent of the $4.2 trillion the US government has spent on coronavirus relief to date.
The money was set aside to compensate businesses hit by successive COVID-19 lockdowns
The impostors, according to the AP, passed on Social Security numbers of dead people or federal inmates their own in order to cash in on 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.
“Here was an endless pot of money that anyone could access,” said Dan Fruchter, a top anti-fraud officer at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington.
“People fooled themselves into thinking it was a socially acceptable thing to do, even if it wasn’t legal,” he told the AP.
The US government has indicted more than 2,230 defendants for pandemic-related fraud crimes and is conducting thousands of investigations.
Most of the looted money comes from three major pandemic relief initiatives launched during the Trump administration and inherited by President Joe Biden.
The programs are designed to help small businesses and the unemployed survive the economic disaster caused by the coronavirus.
Michael Horowitz, the U.S. Department of Justice’s inspector general investigating Covid-related fraud, recently told Congress it “clearly ran into the tens of billions of dollars and could eventually exceed $100 billion.”
“I don’t hesitate to go too far about how much it is,” he told the AP. “But it’s clearly substantial and final accounting is at least a few years away.”
According to official figures, Donald Trump signed on for more than $3 trillion in COVID-related rescue aid
Joe Biden signed a law in August that extended the statute of limitations for fraud-related crimes
Former President Donald Trump has agreed to emergency aid worth a total of $ 3.2 trillion, according to official figures.
Joe Biden’s so-called US bailout sealed spending another $1.9 trillion.
According to the commission’s most recent accounting, about one-fifth of the total $5.2 trillion remains undisbursed.
The pandemic has forced the little-known Small Business Administration to manage nearly a trillion dollars in COVID relief.
For example, in the seven decades before the pandemic hit, the SBA had issued just $67 billion in disaster loans.
Officials there took over management of the COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan and Paycheck Protection programs.
They needed to get money out quickly to help troubled businesses and their employees, which meant controls weren’t as tight as before.
“If you open the bank’s counter and say, give me your application and just promise me that you really are who you say you are, you attract a lot of fraudsters and that’s what happened here,” Horowitz said.
For example, between March 2020 and the end of July 2020, the agency issued 3.2 million COVID-19 economic loss loans totaling $169 billion, according to an SBA inspector general’s report, while at the same time launching the massive new Paycheck Protection Program implemented.
The Biden administration signed legislation in August allowing the DOJ to prosecute 10 years after alleged crimes occurred related to the two major programs administered by the SBA.
More than 1.13 million people have died from COVID-19 in the US, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.