Nearly $100 billion at minimum has been stolen from COVID-19 relief programs set up to help businesses and people who lost their jobs due to the pandemic, the U.S. Secret Service says.
The estimate is based on Secret Service cases and data from the Labor Department and the Small Business Administration, Roy Dotson, the agency’s national pandemic fraud recovery coordinator, revealed in an interview Tuesday. The Secret Service didn’t include COVID-19 fraud cases prosecuted by the Justice Department.
While roughly 3% of the $3.4 trillion dispersed, the amount stolen from pandemic benefits programs shows “the sheer size of the pot is enticing to the criminals,” Dotson said.
Most of that figure comes from unemployment fraud. The Labor Department reported about $87 billion in unemployment benefits could have been paid improperly, with a significant portion attributable to fraud.
No surprise, nothing new. “Government is the great fiction by which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.” Fredrik Bastiat 1801-1850 Bastiat figured this out over 170 years ago. Things have gotten progressively worse. Gang of thieves from top to bottom.