More than $400 billion of COVID aid was lost to fraud or wasted spending under Donald Trump and Joe Biden, a new bombshell report claimed on Monday.
An analysis by the Associated Press said fraudsters and criminals plundered billions of taxpayer cash set aside to fend off economic collapse during the pandemic.
It estimated that $280 billion in COVID relief funding was lost to fraud, while another $123 billion was wasted or misspent.
Both sums are equivalent to 10 percent of the $4.2 trillion that the U.S. government has splashed out so far on coronavirus aid.
The money was set to aside to compensate businesses affected by successive COVID-19 lockdowns
The tricksters, according to the AP, passed off social security numbers of dead people or federal prisoners are their own to rake in unemployment checks.
They sometime even collected benefits in multiple states, the report said.Â
Investigators accuse the U.S. government of failing to provide enough oversight during the pandemic’s early stages.
They also claim that they slapped too few restrictions on applicants, giving possible fraudsters easy access to money stumped up by hard-working Americans.
‘Here was this sort of endless pot of money that anyone could access,’ said Dan Fruchter, a top anti-fraud official at the U.S. Attorney’s office in Washington.Â
‘Folks kind of fooled themselves into thinking that it was a socially acceptable thing to do, even though it wasn’t legal,’ he told the AP.
The U.S. government has charged more than 2,230 defendants with pandemic-related fraud crimes and is conducting thousands of investigations.
Most of the looted money was swiped from three large pandemic-relief initiatives launched during the Trump administration and inherited by President Joe Biden.
The progams were designed to help small businesses and unemployed workers survive the economic disaster unleashed by coronavirus.
Michael Horowitz, the U.S. Justice Department inspector general investigating Covid-related fraud, recently told Congress that it was ‘clearly in the tens of billions of dollars and may eventually exceed $100 billion.
‘I’m hesitant to get too far out on how much it is,’ he was quoted as saying by the AP. ‘But clearly it’s substantial and the final accounting is still at least a couple of years away.’
Donald Trump signed off on more than $3 trillion in COVID-related bailout aid, according to official figures
Joe Biden signed a law in August that extended the statute of limitations for fraud-related crimes
Ex-president President Donald Trump signed off on emergency aid totaling $3.2 trillion, according to official figures.
Joe Biden’s so-called American Rescue Plan rubber-stamped spending of another $1.9 trillion.Â
Roughly a fifth of the total $5.2 trillion has not yet to be paid out, according to the committee’s most recent accounting.
The pandemic meant the little-known Small Business Administration was forced to manage nearly a trillion dollars in COVID aid.
In the seven decades before the pandemic struck, for example, the SBA had doled out just $67 billion in disaster loans.
Officials there took over the management of the COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan and Paycheck Protection programs.
They had to get money out the door, fast, to help struggling businesses and their employees, meaning checks were not as rigorous as before.
‘If you open up the bank window and say, give me your application and just promise me 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 granted 3.2 million COVID-19 economic injury disaster loans totaling $169 billion, according to an SBA inspector general’s report, while at the same time implementing the huge new Paycheck Protection Program.
The Biden administration in August signed legislation to allow the DOJ to prosecute after 10 years after any alleged crimes took place involving the two major programs managed by the SBA.
More than 1.13 million people in the U.S. have died from COVID-19, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
