Breaking news: The U.S. government may have awarded $5.4 billion in covid aid to businesses using potentially ineligible Social Security numbers, watchdog finds
The top watchdog overseeing stimulus spending — called the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, or PRAC — offered the new estimate in an alert issued Monday and shared early with the Washington Post. It comes as House Republicans prepare to hold their first hearing this week to study the roughly $5 trillion in total federal stimulus aid approved since spring 2020.
Studying more than 33 million applicants, the PRAC uncovered more than 221,000 ineligible Social Security numbers on requests for small-business aid. That included thousands of cases where the number itself was “not issued” by the government, for example, or it did not match the correct name and birth information.
But the speed at which Washington doled out the money — and the long-known gaps in government oversight — also created the conditions ripe for waste, fraud and abuse, The Post found in its year-long investigation, the Covid Money Trail. The full extent of taxpayers’ losses remains unknown, even to Washington, even as the time-consuming, expensive work continues to find and prosecute covid-related crimes.
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