The extent of pandemic aid fraud will never be known. To obtain any sort of reliable accounting, there were just so many trillions of dollars and way too many projects managed by inept morons.
The COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan Program and the Paycheck Protection Program are the only two programs for which the inspector general of the Small Business Administration assessed $200 billion in fraud.
The best estimate of fraud, according to the Associated Press, is $280 billion, with an additional $123 billion in squandered or improperly spent funds. This is the reason it is inadvertently humorous to hear about the Justice Department recovering stolen COVID aid. All you can do is laugh heartily and throw up your hands at the DOJ’s $1.4 billion recovery and 3,500 arrests of criminals.
Given that the entire amount of COVID aid stolen is likely in excess of $500 billion, or 10% of all help authorized by Congress, one must ask themselves who has been dismissed for this heinous mismanagement. Where is the responsibility?
Finding the thieves who took the money is one thing. A few of them were simple to capture. While incarcerated, prisoners from California stole $1 billion in unemployment benefits. However, foreigners who took advantage of the criminally lenient monitoring and fled with riches were mostly responsible for the scam. Most likely, they will get away with it.
Attorney General Merrick Garland told reporters on Tuesday, “We will continue to investigate and legally prosecute pandemic relief fraud and to collect the assets that have been taken from American taxpayers.”
USA Today:
“Federal authorities charged 47 individuals in September 2022 with embezzling $250 million from a coronavirus pandemic assistance program, which aimed to feed children, through “a brazen fraud of breathtaking dimensions.” Charges against 21 persons suspected of stealing $149 million from government programs and making fraudulent claims of billing stemmed from a sweep of suspects that included physicians, marketers, and producers of phony vaccination cards in April 2022. According to a USA TODAY investigation, fifteen of the biggest and most severely affected states gave hundreds of millions of dollars in sole-sourced noncompetitive contracts to suppliers of masks and other products suspected to have defrauded taxpayers.”
A measure to extend the statute of limitations is one of the most significant ideas now before Congress, since it is obvious that investigations will carry on long after the statutory deadlines have passed.
We are thinking about adding more provisions.
“Tripling the budget to $300 million so that prosecution teams may work together to investigate pandemic fraud. increasing the maximum fine in civil fraud cases from $150,000 to $1 million. The inspectors general of the Labor Department and the Small Business Administration will receive $250 million to assist them in identifying and recovering fraudulent activities.
Plagiarism estimates differ because, very frankly, Democrats are averse to knowing the full extent of fraud losses.
Furthermore, Democrats are averse to learning who is accountable for the wrongdoing. The heads of cabinet secretaries ought to roll at the very least, but that will not happen either. Both the half trillion dollars in fraud and the oversight of the alleged “Biggest Scam in American History” have already disappeared.
Author: Blake Ambrose
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