“We estimate that SBA disbursed over $200 billion in potentially fraudulent COVID-19 EIDLs, EIDL Targeted Advances, Supplemental Targeted Advances, and PPP loans. This means at least 17 percent of all COVID-19 EIDL and PPP funds were disbursed to potentially fraudulent actors.”
"At least" $35 billion in pandemic relief money
- $29 billion was in the Pandemic Protection Program
- $6.9 billion was in the Economic Injury Disaster Loan program
IRS has 975 tax and money laundering cases related to pandemic fraud with a total of $3.2 billion in alleged fraud. 236 already sentenced for avg. 37 months in prison. ~100% conviction rate.
From: https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-23-105523.pdf "the lower bound of this fraud rate (7.6 percent) extrapolated to total spending across all Unemployment Insurance (UI) programs ... suggest over $60 billion in fraudulent UI payments."
- Cases of Proven Fraud: "currently $4.3 billion dollars of fraud based on formal determinations"
From: https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-22-104397 and https://www.asas.org/taking-stock/blog-post/taking-stock/202...
- Coronavirus Food Assistance Program (CFAP) provided producers $31.0 billion for various commodities ... half of the producers that GAO reviewed did not provide full support for their payments. The payments are therefore potentially improper.
- USDA’s Business Center 2021 payment integrity review for CFAP estimated that CFAP had a significant improper payment rate for the fiscal year 2020 ... estimated that that $450M were improper.
As someone who works at a non-profit that partners with various for-profits, I'm skeptical that the IRS would allow such sort of large-scale tax fraud to happen.
That figure covers a lot of tax fraud identity verification doesn't solve. The actual figures are around $25bn a year of stopped fraudulent refunds, at a cost of a few thousand employees [1].
Not directly, but certain IRS ranking officials have targeted specific groups in the past for both administrations.
However, there is also rampant fraud with the EITC. Similarly with the Child Tax Credit, it is likely because it is refundable, meaning that you receive a check after your taxes are paid rather than a deduction which can only bring your liability down to zero. Also auditing these are fairly trivial and usually only done through the mail so they can send them out en masse based on red flags.
> "The IRS estimates that 22 to 26 percent of EITC payments were issued improperly in Fiscal Year 2013. The dollar value of these improper payments was estimated to be between $13.3 billion and $15.6 billion."
Kind of strange they had a whole article about decreasing fraud cases, and don't mention the IRS had to apologize for aggressive targeting of conservative groups in October 2017. Maybe that's why their budget got cut?
I remember reading a while ago that every $1 that goes into IRS to fund tax fraud cases yielded $1.2 in return. When that's the case, it seems like a no-brainer that it should be well-funded.
“We estimate that SBA disbursed over $200 billion in potentially fraudulent COVID-19 EIDLs, EIDL Targeted Advances, Supplemental Targeted Advances, and PPP loans. This means at least 17 percent of all COVID-19 EIDL and PPP funds were disbursed to potentially fraudulent actors.”
https://www.sba.gov/document/report-23-09-covid-19-pandemic-...
IRS also covered some:
https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/irs-criminal-investigation-rele...
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