We will never know how much pandemic aid fraud was committed. There were just too many trillions of dollars, and too many programs run by incompetent fools to get any kind of accurate accounting.
The inspector general for the Small Business Administration estimated $200 billion in fraud for just two programs: the COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan program and the Paycheck Protection Program.
Associated Press put the best guestimate for fraud at $280 billion with another $123 billion either wasted or misspent. This is why news of the Justice Department's recovery of stolen COVID aid is unintentionally hilarious. What else can you do but throw up your hands and laugh at the fact the DOJ has recovered $1.4 billion and arrested 3,500 crooks?
With total COVID aid theft probably topping half a trillion dollars, or 10% of the total aid appropriated by Congress, you have to wonder who's been fired for this horrific malfeasance. Where's the accountability?
It's one thing to catch the criminals who stole the money. Some of them were easy to catch. California convicts stole a billion dollars in unemployment comp money while in prison. But a lot of the fraud was the result of foreign nationals taking advantage of the criminally lax oversight and making off with fortunes. They will likely get away with it.
“We will continue our efforts to investigate and prosecute pandemic relief fraud and to recover the assets that have been stolen from American taxpayers,” Attorney General Merrick Garland told reporters Tuesday.
Federal charges were unveiled in September 2022 against 47 people accused of siphoning $250 million from a coronavirus pandemic relief program designed to provide meals for children in “a brazen scheme of staggering proportions.”
A sweep of suspects including doctors, marketers and manufacturers of fake vaccination cards in April 2022 resulted in charges against 21 people accused with $149 million in false billings and theft from government programs.
Fifteen of the largest and hardest-hit states awarded hundreds of millions of dollars in sole-sourced noncompetitive awards to vendors for items such as masks that have been accused of defrauding taxpayers, a USA TODAY investigation found.
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One of the most important proposals before Congress is a bill to extend the statute of limitations because it's clear the investigations are going to continue long after the statutory limits are exceeded.
Other provisions are being considered.
Tripling the funding to $300 million for prosecution teams coordinating pandemic fraud investigations.
Raising the cap on penalties in civil fraud cases to $1 million from $150,000.
Providing $250 million to the Small Business Administration and Labor Department inspectors general to identify and recover fraud.
Estimates of the total amount of fraud vary because, quite frankly, Democrats don’t want to know how much was lost to fraud.
Democrats also don't want to know who's responsible for the malfeasance. At the very least, cabinet secretaries' heads need to roll, but that won't happen, either. The half trillion dollars in fraud has already disappeared down the rabbit hole along with the responsibility for overseeing what's being called "The Biggest Scam in American History."
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