![]() ![]() Prospective borrowers were allowed to “self-certify” that their loan applications were true. In the haste, guardrails to protect federal money were dropped. 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. COVID-19 pushed SBA’s pace from a walk into an Olympic sprint. SBA’s workforce had to get money out the door, fast, to help struggling businesses and their employees. When the pandemic struck, the agency was assigned to manage two massive relief efforts –the COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan and Paycheck Protection programs, which would swell to more than a trillion dollars. In the seven decades before the pandemic struck, for example, the SBA had doled out $67 billion in disaster loans. The health crisis thrust the Small Business Administration, an agency that typically gets little attention, into an unprecedented role. Comptroller General Gene Dodaro told Congress. “The largest rescue package in American history,” U.S. Never has so much federal emergency aid been injected into the U.S. About a fifth of the $5.2 trillion has yet to be fully paid out, according to the committee’s most recent accounting. President Joe Biden’s 2021 American Rescue Plan authorized the spending of another $1.9 trillion. Where did scam artists get the money?īefore leaving office, former President Donald Trump approved emergency aid measures totaling $3.2 trillion, according to figures from the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee. ![]() have died from COVID-19, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Since the pandemic began in early 2020, more than 1.13 million people in the U.S. ![]() But all of the theft, big and small, illustrate an epidemic of scams and swindles at a time America was grappling with overrun hospitals, school closures and shuttered businesses. The pilfering was wide but not always as deep as the eye-catching headlines about cases involving many millions of dollars. government has charged more than 2,230 defendants with pandemic-related fraud crimes and is conducting thousands of investigations. “Folks kind of fooled themselves into thinking that it was a socially acceptable thing to do, even though it wasn’t legal.” Attorney’s office in the Eastern District of Washington. “Here was this sort of endless pot of money that anyone could access,” said Dan Fruchter, chief of the fraud and white-collar crime unit at the U.S. In short, they say, the grift was just way too easy. Investigators and outside experts say the government, in seeking to quickly spend trillions in relief aid, conducted too little oversight during the pandemic’s early stages and instituted too few restrictions on applicants. There are myriad reasons for the staggering loss. ![]() That number is certain to grow as investigators dig deeper into thousands of potential schemes. government has so far disbursed in COVID-relief aid. Combined, the loss represents a jarring 10% of the $4.2 trillion the U.S. How much was stolen?Īn Associated Press analysis found that fraudsters potentially stole more than $280 billion in COVID-19 relief funding another $123 billion was wasted or misspent. Here are some key takeaways from an Associated Press analysis of what may have been stolen or wasted. Over the last three years, thieves plundered billions of dollars in federal COVID-19 relief aid intended to combat the worst pandemic in a century and to stabilize an economy in free fall. ![]()
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