$163 billion of COVID relief was stolen. Republicans must get to the bottom of it
Fox News
Massive fraud in pandemic-era federal relief programs should be at the top of Republicans' agenda.
Matt Weidinger is the Rowe Fellow in poverty studies at the American Enterprise Institute. He is a former deputy staff director of the House Committee on Ways and Means.
Those huge payouts—and serious weaknesses in federal temporary benefit program design—attracted criminals intent on ripping off the system. The new federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program was the most vulnerable to abuse. It offered weekly checks to independent contractors, the self-employed, and others who worked too little to qualify for regular state Unemployment Insurance (UI) checks. In contrast with UI, PUA allowed claimants to self-certify their eligibility and initially did not even require proof of prior work or adequate identity verification. As the Department of Labor’s (DOL’s) Inspector General (IG) summarized, PUA was "extremely susceptible to improper payments and fraud."
How much was stolen? Official estimates—which admittedly understate real losses—are staggering. The DOL IG estimates $163 billion was lost, including to fraud. That is based on an estimated improper payment rate of 18.71 percent from July 2020 to June 2021. But that misses the massive spike in claims early in the pandemic, along with losses under the PUA program, which was most prone to abuse. Counting those factors, unofficial loss estimates range to as high as $400 billion, or an astonishing 40 percent of all benefits paid. Significant shares were likely stolen by overseas criminal gangs, including in China and Russia.