Federal Government Lost 5x More to Stimulus Fraud than it Spent Developing COVID Vaccines.
Whenever the government spends money, a significant portion is lost to bureaucracy, waste, and fraud. But the sheer speed, haste, and unprecedented scope of federal spending in response to the COVID-19 pandemic—an astounding $6 trillion total—has led to truly unthinkable levels of fraud. Indeed, a March 2021 report shows that the feds potentially lost $200 billion in unemployment fraud alone.
“More than $200 billion of unemployment benefits distributed in the pandemic may have been pocketed by thieves, according to ID.me, a computer security service that 19 states — accounting for 75% of the national population — use to verify worker identities,” Yahoo Money reports. “That’s more than triple the official government estimate of $63 billion based on the 10% pre-pandemic fraud rate.”
To put that $200 billion figure in context, it is equivalent to $1,400 lost to fraud per federal taxpayer. (There goes your stimmy check!)
Or, comparing it to the $37 billion the federal government spent on vaccine and treatment development, it’s more than five times more lost to fraud than went to arguably the most crucial COVID initiative of all. That’s just scratching the surface. According to the American Enterprise Institute, “unemployment fraud” now ranks as the 4th biggest federal COVID expenditure out of more than 17 different categories….
h/t ED