Years after passing government COVID-era relief and the likely loss of hundreds of billions of public dollars, lawmakers still don’t know where that money went or how to get it back, and they don’t seem to have done much to stop it from happening again.
Reports from the government watchdog and other sources say that waste, fraud, and abuse cost between $200 billion and $500 billion in different federal and state programs during the COVID era.
Republican-led House Oversight Committee released a report this week saying that insiders, including people who worked for state worker agencies, worked with organized crime groups and other people to cheat state UI programs, and the states didn’t do much to stop them. “Some states even hired people who had been guilty of identity theft to handle UI cases.”
That kind of thing and the amount of money that was lost were the topics of this week’s House Oversight hearing. Lawmakers from both parties and experts talked about how much money was lost and what should be done about it.
The meeting heard from Subcommittee on Government Operations and the Federal Workforce Chairman Pete Sessions, R-Texas. He said:
“The expected amounts of waste, fraud, and abuse in COVID-related programs are simply… mind-boggling. There are six billion dollars. There may be more. We lost a lot of it to criminals and our enemies. Using a lot of ridiculously simple strategies.”
The most common of these schemes was taking jobless benefits given by the government during the pandemic.
Based on a study from the Small Business Administration’s inspector general, taxpayers lost at least $200 billion.
The study said, “We think that SBA issued over $200 billion in COVID funds that may have been fraudulent. This means that at least 17% of all PPP funds were given to people who might have been involved in theft.”
The thieves in question have almost all gotten away with their crimes so far.
