Years after the passage of federal COVID-era relief and the subsequent loss of likely hundreds of billions of those taxpayer dollars, lawmakers are still unsure where that money went, how to get it back, and seemingly have done little to prevent it from happening again.
Federal watchdog and other reports estimate anywhere from $200 billion to half a trillion was lost to waste, fraud and abuse across various federal and state COVID-era programs.
“Insiders, including those who worked for state workforce agencies, conspired with organized crime factions and other individuals to defraud state UI programs and the states did little to stop them,” a Republican-led House Oversight Committee report released this week said. “Some states even hired individuals convicted of identity theft to process UI claims.”
Examples like that and the scope of the amount lost was the subject of a House Oversight hearing this week where lawmakers on both sides of the aisle and experts grappled with the scope of the lost funds and what to do about it.
“The estimated amounts of waste, fraud, and abuse in COVID-related programs are simply … mind-boggling,” Subcommittee on Government Operations and the Federal Workforce Chairman Pete Sessions, R-Texas, said at the hearing. “Half a trillion dollars. Maybe more. Much of it lost to criminal actors and our enemies. Often using comically simple tactics.”
The most common among those tactics was stealing unemployment dollars doled out by the federal government during the pandemic.
One inspector general report from the Small Business Adminstration estimated at least $200 billion in taxpayer money was lost.
Read more at Justthenews.com
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