Mercedes, Mansions, And Murder: How Fraudsters Spent Millions In COVID Relief Funds

In his 2022 State of the Union address, President Biden said, “Tonight, I’m announcing that the Justice Department will name a chief prosecutor for pandemic fraud.” Sorting through the mounds of waste and abuse in the government’s pandemic relief programs might make that official as sick as the Omicron variant.

With the economy setting new records for growth and prosperity, politicians forced businesses to close their doors in the name of fighting COVID-19. To compensate, the federal government allocated trillions of tax dollars to relieve laid-off workers — but instead of reaching them, some of those funds purchased sports cars, put down payments on luxurious homes, and even reportedly paid a hitman to kill a 24-year-old woman and her three-year-old daughter.

The culprit is the size, scope, and speed of the relief effort’s two largest programs for small businesses: the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL). The Small Business Administration, which administered both programs, said it lacked the personnel and resources to vet the sheer volume of applications it received — so the SBA processed as many loans in 14 days as it normally approves in 14 years. A report from the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, released in January, stated:

The SBA, in conjunction with the U.S. Department of the Treasury, approved a nationwide network of more than 5,000 lenders, including about 800 new lenders, to review PPP applications, assess borrowers’ eligibility, and decide on the suitability of making a loan under delegated authority. PPP lenders reviewed loans quickly, disbursing more than 1.7 million loans totaling nearly $343.3 billion in just 14 days after the SBA launched the program. According to the SBA, it “…processed 14 years’ worth of loans in the first 14 days of the PPP program and reached the smallest businesses with an average loan of $101,000.”

The SBA admitted that, in the process, it “lowered the guardrails” protecting taxpayers against fraud. – READ MORE