The health crisis thrust the Small Business Administration, an agency that typically gets little attention, into an unprecedented role. “But clearly it’s substantial and the final accounting is still at least a couple of years away.”Īn IRS spokesman said the agency does not agree with all the figures cited by the watchdog and noted that, even if correct, the loss represented a tiny fraction of the program’s budget. “I’m hesitant to get too far out on how much it is,” he said. Horowitz told the AP he was sticking with that estimate, but won’t be certain about the number until he gets more solid data.

Justice Department inspector general who chairs the federal Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, told Congress the fraud is “clearly in the tens of billions of dollars” and may eventually exceed $100 billion. 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, illustrates 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.

Those programs were designed to help small businesses and unemployed workers survive the economic upheaval caused by the pandemic. Most of the looted money was swiped from three large pandemic-relief initiatives launched during the Trump administration and inherited by President Joe Biden. A sheet of uncut $100 bills is inspected during the printing process at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing Western Currency Facility in Fort Worth, Texas, on Sept.

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