The fraud in the absurd and wasteful COVID Relief funding packages that Congress passed during the worst of the scamdemic was monumental, so bad that even IRS employees were caught stealing millions.
A report by government watchdog Judicial Watch reveals just how bad the fraud and waste was in the fake COVID “relief” programs.
Judicial Watch notes that the Justice Department created a special COVID-19 Fraud Enforcement Task Force (CFETF) to look into the fraud that started in three years ago when Congress passed the American Rescue Plan of 2021.
This was a massive block of two TRILLION in spending designed to help Americans suffer through the very lockdowns and other needless restrictions that the government itself imposed on us all. It was needless “relief” heaped on top of needless policies.
The government has identified more than $2 billion lost to fraud. And that is just what they have found thus far.
To date, the investigations have netted 3,500 defendants, 400 disputes, and judgments resulting in $100 million.
There was fraud and abuse throughout the country, but let’s start with Joe Biden’s thoroughly corrupt Internal Revenue Service.
Per Judicial Watch:
Even government employees have defrauded the system. Back in the fall of 2022 Internal Revenue Service (IRS) employees got charged with stealing over a million dollars from pandemic relief programs to buy luxury goods, fancy cars, and travel. Five employees from the feared tax agency in Tennessee and Mississippi easily withdrew the money by filing false loan applications with two of the federal stimulus programs, PPP and EIDL. Federal authorities say they used the illegally obtained pandemic relief funds to buy expensive designer clothes (Gucci), a fancy imported car (Mercedes-Benz), jewelry, trips to Las Vegas, manicures, and massages. The leftover cash got deposited into personal investment accounts.
You can bet there were far more IRS thieves stealing from us than that, too. Those above are just the ones that got charged.
Some more examples include:
The report includes examples from around the nation. In Minnesota dozens of individuals have been charged for operating a $250 million fraud scheme that exploited a federally funded child nutrition program during the COVID-19 pandemic. A Florida defendant was sentenced to eight years in prison for obtaining more than $7.2 million in PPP loan funds, which he used to purchase luxury cars and a 12-acre estate. In Washington, the ringleader of a $6.8 million pandemic fraud ring was sentenced to five years in prison for seeking funds from various relief programs. In Michigan, a man was sentenced to 15 years in prison for using stolen identities to illegally obtain $2.1 million in unemployment insurance benefits from multiple states and to traffic methamphetamine.
Many of these criminals may end up escaping justice because the statute of limitations on these crimes is approcahing.
In a statement announcing the CFETF’s latest report Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco indicates that the fraud is widespread and overwhelming federal prosecutors. “The statute of limitations must be extended and the necessary funding and data analytic tools secured for our prosecutors to recover hundreds of millions of dollars more in fraud proceeds, bring remaining offenders to justice, and disrupt criminal networks that continue to victimize our citizens,” Monaco said. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland assures us his agency’s work is far from over. “We will continue our efforts to investigate and prosecute pandemic relief fraud and to recover the assets that have been stolen from American taxpayers,” Garland said. CFETF Director Michael C. Galdo, a veteran federal prosecutor, confirmed that “much work remains in the fight against COVID-19 fraud.”
The sad thing is that every single government program with millions in spending are rife with fraud like this.
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