Pandemic fraud scheme stole billions from US

 Sarah Westwood:

Billions of dollars meant to help people cope with the pain of the pandemic disappeared in fraud schemes big and small, and the government is only now taking stock of how extensive the abuse became.

The Justice Department charged 48 people this week with operating a massive fraud ring in Minnesota that drained $240 million from a pandemic hunger program intended to feed children.

Dozens of people allegedly made up names and ages for children they claimed to have fed, then pocketed the money for those fake meals.

While the scale of the scheme was unusual, the approach was not.

So much money flowed to programs with so little oversight that people all over the world managed to siphon off piles of cash that the government is unlikely ever to recover.

“Congress failed to implement any tracking, accountability, [or] oversight into any of the programs, any of the funding that they issued over the last three years,” Deborah Collier, vice president for policy and government affairs at Citizens Against Government Waste, told the Washington Examiner. “It’s just nonexistent.”

WATCHDOG IDENTIFIES $45 BILLION PAID IN FRAUDULENT COVID-19 UNEMPLOYMENT CLAIMS

The Labor Department’s inspector general estimated that the improper payment rate for pandemic unemployment programs exceeded 19%.

In California, for example, officials estimated that fraud could account for as much as 27% of the pandemic jobless benefits it paid in 2020.

In Maryland, officials detected a stunning 508,000 fraudulent claims over just one six-week window last summer.

The enormous amount of money available and the speed at which the government pushed it out the door created abundant opportunities for fraud.
...

I blame the Democrats for overreacting to the pandemic by locking down businesses and institutions and then shoveling out money to those they put out of work or fraudsters who they thought had been put out of work.  Now they know some of the claims were fraudulent, but they cannot identify all the fraudsters.

See, also:

80% of large public school districts receiving federal relief money have declining enrollments

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