The Great Grift: More than $200 billion in COVID-19 aid may have been stolen, federal watchdog says.

WASHINGTON (AP) — More than $200 billion may have been stolen from two large COVID-19 relief initiatives, according to new estimates from a federal watchdog investigating federally funded programs that helped small businesses survive the worst public health crisis in more than a hundred years.
The numbers issued Tuesday by the U.S. Small Business Administration inspector general are much greater than the office’s previous projections and underscore how vulnerable the Paycheck Protection and COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan programs were to fraudsters, particularly during the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic.
The inspector general’s report said “at least 17 percent of all COVID-EIDL and PPP funds were disbursed to potentially fraudulent actors.” The fraud estimate for the COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan program is more than $136 billion, which represents 33 percent of the total money spent on that program, according to the report. The Paycheck Protection fraud estimate is $64 billion, the inspector general said.
In comments attached to the report, a senior SBA official disputed the new numbers. Bailey DeVries, SBA’s acting associate administrator for capital access, said the inspector general’s “approach contains serious flaws that significantly overestimate fraud and unintentionally mislead the public to believe that the work we did together had no significant impact in protecting against fraud.”
The SBA inspector general had previously estimated fraud in the COVID-19 disaster loan program at $86 billion and the Paycheck Protection program at $20 billion.
The Associated Press reported June 13 that scammers and swindlers potentially swiped about $280 billion in COVID-19 emergency aid; an additional $123 billion was wasted or misspent. The bulk of the potential losses are from the two SBA programs and another to provide unemployment benefits to workers suddenly unemployed by the economic upheaval caused by the pandemic. The three initiatives were begun during the Trump administration and inherited by President Joe Biden. Combined, the loss estimated by AP represents 10% of the $4.2 trillion the U.S. government has so far disbursed in COVID relief aid.
The federal government has now reported $276 billion in potential fraud, a figure that aligns with the AP’s analysis.