- The Justice Department said 3,500 people have been charged and $1.4 billion recovered through pandemic fraud investigations.
- Lawmakers and the White House are asking to extend the deadline to prosecute pandemic fraud and authorize inspectors general to continue their reviews of pandemic spending.
WASHINGTON – During the last three years, the Justice Department’s COVID-19 Enforcement Task Force has charged more than 3,500 people with federal crimes, recovered more than $1.4 billion in stolen pandemic funds and reached more than 400 civil settlements and judgments, officials said Tuesday.
White House officials and lawmakers used the announcement as a springboard to propose legislation to provide more funding for anti-fraud enforcement, extend the statute of limitations on prosecuting crimes and improving government databases to better detect when payments shouldn’t be made.
“We will continue our efforts to investigate and prosecute pandemic relief fraud and to recover the assets that have been stolen from American taxpayers,” Attorney General Merrick Garland told reporters Tuesday.
Investigations found false billings and siphoning money from children’s meals
A sample of fraud investigations includes:
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- Federal charges unveiled in September 2022 against 47 people accused of siphoning $250 million from a coronavirus pandemic relief program designed to provide meals for children, in “a brazen scheme of staggering proportions.”
- A sweep of suspects including doctors, marketers and manufacturers of fake vaccination cards in April 2022 resulted in charges against 21 people accused with $149 million in false billings and theft from government programs.
- Fifteen of the largest and hardest-hit states awarded hundreds of millions of dollars in sole-sourced, non-competitive awards went to vendors for items such as masks that have been accused of defrauding taxpayers, a USA TODAY investigation found.
Lawmakers, White House call for legislation to expand fraud enforcement
Democratic senators and White House officials contended Tuesday that legislation is needed to keep fighting COVID fraud, as the senators unveiled a bill that includes a provisions to combat it.
Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., chair of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said the pandemic “led to historic levels of fraud” and that bad actors “took advantage of the disaster for their own financial gain.”
The proposals include:
- Tripling the funding to $300 million for prosecution teams coordinating pandemic fraud investigations.
- Raising the cap on penalties in civil fraud cases to $1 million from $150,000.
- Providing $250 million to the Small Business Administration and Labor Department inspectors general to identify and recover fraud.
- Extending the statute of limitations on pandemic unemployment insurance fraud to 10 years from five years.
“The statute of limitations must be extended and the necessary funding and data analytic tools secured for our prosecutors to recover hundreds of millions of dollars more in fraud proceeds, bring remaining offenders to justice, and disrupt criminal networks that continue to victimize our citizens,” Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said in a statement.
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., chair of the Finance Committee, said another important provision would create a Social Security number verification system to thwart identity theft.
“This is really an epidemic,” Wyden said. “Millions of Americans have been victims of identity theft.”
Gene Sperling, American Rescue Plan coordinator and senior adviser to President Joe Biden, said funding must be committed over a period of several years in order to hire investigators who can pursue the most sophisticated criminals.
“If we’re going to be committed to going after the most sophisticated criminals and criminal syndicates, who abused our system the most, you not only need a longer statute of limitations, you need to give enforcement and oversight the security to do multi-year hiring,” Sperling said. “Without that, we may lose people.”
