WASHINGTON (AP) � Much of the theft was brazen, even simple.

Fraudsters used the Social Security numbers of dead people and federal
prisoners to get unemployment checks. Cheaters collected those benefits in
multiple states. And federal loan applicants weren�t cross-checked against a
Treasury Department database that would have raised red flags about sketchy
borrowers.

Criminals and gangs grabbed the money. But so did a U.S. soldier in Georgia,
the pastors of a defunct church in Texas, a former state lawmaker in Missouri
and a roofing contractor in Montana.

All of it led to the greatest grift in U.S. history, with thieves plundering
billions of dollars in federal COVID-19 relief aid intended to combat the
worst pandemic in a century and to stabilize an economy in free fall.

An Associated Press analysis found that fraudsters potentially stole more
than $280 billion in COVID-19 relief funding; another $123 billion was wasted
or misspent. Combined, the loss represents 10% of the $4.2 trillion the U.S.
government has so far disbursed in COVID relief aid.

That number is certain to grow as investigators dig deeper into thousands of
potential schemes.

How could so much be stolen? Investigators and outside experts say the
government, in seeking to quickly spend trillions in relief aid, conducted
too little oversight during the pandemic�s early stages and instituted too
few restrictions on applicants. In short, they say, the grift was just way
too easy.

�Here was this sort of endless pot of money that anyone could access,� said
Dan Fruchter, chief of the fraud and white-collar crime unit at the U.S.
Attorney�s office in the Eastern District of Washington. �Folks kind of
fooled themselves into thinking that it was a socially acceptable thing to
do, even though it wasn�t legal.�

The U.S. government has charged more than 2,230 defendants with pandemic-
related fraud crimes and is conducting thousands of investigations.

Most of the looted money was swiped from three large pandemic-relief
initiatives launched during the Trump administration and inherited by
President Joe Biden. Those programs were designed to help small businesses
and unemployed workers survive the economic upheaval caused by the pandemic.

The pilfering was wide but not always as deep as the eye-catching headlines
about cases involving many millions of dollars. But all of the theft, big and
small, illustrates an epidemic of scams and swindles at a time America was
grappling with overrun hospitals, school closures and shuttered businesses.
Since the pandemic began in early 2020, more than 1.13 million people in the
U.S. have died from COVID-19, according to the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention.

Michael Horowitz, the U.S. Justice Department inspector general who chairs
the federal Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, told Congress the
fraud is �clearly in the tens of billions of dollars� and may eventually
exceed $100 billion.

Horowitz told the AP he was sticking with that estimate, but won�t be certain
about the number until he gets more solid data.

�I�m hesitant to get too far out on how much it is,� he said. �But clearly
it�s substantial and the final accounting is still at least a couple of years
away.�

Mike Galdo, the U.S. Justice Department�s acting director for COVID-19 Fraud
Enforcement, said, �It is an unprecedented amount of fraud.�

Before leaving office, former President Donald Trump approved emergency aid
measures totaling $3.2 trillion, according to figures from the Pandemic
Response Accountability Committee. Biden�s 2021 American Rescue Plan
authorized the spending of another $1.9 trillion. About a fifth of the $5.2
trillion has yet to be paid out, according to the committee�s most recent
accounting.

Never has so much federal emergency aid been injected into the U.S. economy
so quickly. �The largest rescue package in American history,� U.S.
Comptroller General Gene Dodaro told Congress.

The enormous scale of that package has obscured multibillion-dollar mistakes.

An $837 billion IRS program, for example, succeeded 99% of the time in
getting economic stimulus checks to the proper taxpayers, according to the
tax agency. Nevertheless, that 1% failure rate translated into nearly $8
billion going to �ineligible individuals,� a Treasury Department inspector
general told AP.

An IRS spokesman said the agency does not agree with all the figures cited by
the watchdog and noted that, even if correct, the loss represented a tiny
fraction of the program�s budget.

The health crisis thrust the Small Business Administration, an agency that
typically gets little attention, into an unprecedented role. In the seven
decades before the pandemic struck, for example, the SBA had doled out $67
billion in disaster loans.

When the pandemic struck, the agency was assigned to manage two massive
relief efforts � the COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan and Paycheck
Protection programs, which would swell to more than a trillion dollars. SBA�s
workforce had to get money out the door, fast, to help struggling businesses
and their employees. COVID-19 pushed SBA�s pace from a walk to an Olympic
sprint. Between March 2020 and the end of July 2020, the agency granted 3.2
million COVID-19 economic injury disaster loans totaling $169 billion,
according to an SBA inspector general�s report, while at the same time
implementing the huge new Paycheck Protection Program.

In the haste, guardrails to protect federal money were dropped. Prospective
borrowers were allowed to �self-certify� that their loan applications were
true. The CARES Act also barred SBA from looking at tax return transcripts
that could have weeded out shady or undeserving applicants, a decision
eventually reversed at the end of 2020.

�If you open up the bank window and say, give me your application and just
promise me you really are who you say you are, you attract a lot of
fraudsters and that�s what happened here,� Horowitz said.

The SBA inspector general�s office has estimated fraud in the COVID-19
economic injury disaster loan program at $86 billion and the Paycheck
Protection program at $20 billion. The watchdog is expected in coming weeks
to release revised loss figures that are likely to be much higher.

In an interview, SBA Inspector General Hannibal �Mike� Ware declined to say
what the new fraud estimate for both programs will be.

�It will be a figure that is fair, that is 1,000% defensible by my office,
fully backed by our significant criminal investigative activity that is
taking place in this space,� Ware said.

Ware and his staff are overwhelmed with pandemic-related audits and
investigations. The office has a backlog of more than 80,000 actionable
leads, close to a 100 years� worth of work.

�Death by a thousand cuts might be death by 80,000 cuts for them,� Horowitz
said of Ware�s workload. �It�s just the magnitude of it, the enormity of it.�

A 2022 study from the University of Texas at Austin found almost five times
as many suspicious Paycheck Protection loans as the $20 billion SBA�s
inspector general has reported so far. The research, led by finance professor
John Griffin, found as much as $117 billion in questionable and possibly
fraudulent loans, citing indicators such as non-registered businesses and
multiple loans to the same address.

Horowitz, the pandemic watchdog chairman, criticized the government�s failure
early on to use the �Do Not Pay� Treasury Department database, designed to
keep government money from going to debarred contractors, fugitives, felons
or people convicted of tax fraud. Those reviews, he said, could have been
done quickly.

�It�s a false narrative that has been set out, that there are only two
choices,� Horowitz said. �One choice is, get the money out right away. And
that the only other choice was to spend weeks and months trying to figure out
who was entitled to it.�

In less than a few days, a week at most, Horowitz said, SBA might have
discovered thousands of ineligible applicants.

�24 hours? 48 hours? Would that really have upended the program?� Horowitz
said. �I don�t think it would have. And it was data sitting there. It didn�t
get checked.�

The Biden administration put in place stricter rules to stem pandemic fraud,
including use of the �Do Not Pay� database. Biden also recently proposed a
$1.6 billion plan to boost law enforcement efforts to go after pandemic
relief fraudsters.

�I think the bottom line is regardless of what the number is, it emanates
overwhelmingly from three programs that were designed and originated in 2020
with too many large holes that opened the door to criminal fraud,� Gene
Sperling, the White House American Rescue Plan coordinator, said in an
interview.

�We came into office when the largest amounts of fraud were already out of
the barn,� Sperling added.

In a statement, an SBA spokesperson declined to say whether the agency agrees
with the figures issued by Ware�s office, saying the federal government has
not developed an accepted system for assessing fraud in government programs.
Previous analyses have pointed to �potential fraud� or �fraud indicators� in
a manner that conveys those numbers as a true fraud estimate when they are
not, according to the statement.

Han Nguyen, a spokesman for the SBA, said Monday that �the vast majority of
the likely fraud originated in the first nine months of the pandemic
programs, under the Trump administration.� For the COVID-19 economic injury
disaster loan program, Nguyen said, SBA�s �working estimate� found $28
billion in likely fraud.

The coronavirus pandemic plunged the U.S. economy into a short but
devastating recession. Jobless rates soared into double digits and Washington
sent hundreds of billions of dollars to states to help the suddenly
unemployed.

For crooks, it was like tossing chum into the sea to lure fish. Many of these
state unemployment agencies used antiquated computer systems or had too few
staff to stop bogus claims from being paid.

<p>AP correspondent Donna Warder reports on Pandemic Aid Great Grift; the
plundering of billions of dollars during the worst pandemic in a century.</p>
�Yes, the states were overwhelmed in terms of demand,� said Brent Parton,
acting assistant secretary of the U.S. Labor Department�s Employment and
Training Administration. �We had not seen a spike like this ever in a global
event like a pandemic. The systems were underfunded. They were not resilient.
And I would say, more importantly, were vulnerable to sophisticated attacks
by fraudsters.�

Fraud in pandemic unemployment assistance programs stands at $76 billion,
according to congressional testimony from Labor Department Inspector General
Larry Turner. That�s a conservative estimate. Another $115 billion mistakenly
went to people who should not have received the benefits, according to his
testimony.

Turner declined AP�s request for an interview.

Turner�s task in identifying all of the pandemic unemployment insurance fraud
has been complicated by a lack of cooperation from the federal Bureau of
Prisons, according to a September �alert memo� issued by his office. Scam
artists used Social Security numbers of federal prisoners to steal millions
of dollars in benefits.

His office still doesn�t know exactly how much was swiped that way. The
prison bureau had declined to provide current data about federal prisoners.
The AP reached out to the bureau several times for comment, starting June 2.
Bureau spokesperson Emery Nelson said on Monday the agency had provided in
February and March �all the necessary data� to the Pandemic Response
Accountability Committee. Turner is a member of the committee.

Ohio State Auditor Keith Faber saw trouble coming when safeguards to ensure
the unemployment aid only went to people who legitimately qualified were
lowered, making conditions ripe for fraud and waste. The state�s unemployment
agency �took controls down because on the one hand, they literally were
drinking from a firehose,� Faber said. �They had a year�s worth of claims in
a couple of weeks. The second part of the problem was the (federal
government) directed them to get the money out the door as quickly as
possible and worry less about security. They took that to heart. I think that
was a mistake.�

Ohio�s Department of Job and Family Services reported in February $1 billion
in fraudulent pandemic unemployment claims and another $4.8 billion in
overpayments.

The ubiquitous masks that became a symbol of the COVID-19 pandemic are seen
on fewer and fewer faces. Hospitalizations for the virus have steadily
declined, according to CDC data, and Biden in April ended the national
emergency to respond to the pandemic.

But on politically divided Capitol Hill, lawmakers have not put the pandemic
behind them and are engaged in a fierce debate over the success of the relief
spending and who�s to blame for the theft.

Too much government money, Republicans argue, breeds fraud, waste and
inflation. Democrats have countered that all the financial muscle from
Washington saved lives, businesses and jobs.

The GOP-led House Oversight and Accountability Committee is investigating
pandemic relief spending. �We must identify where this money went, how much
ended up in the hands of fraudsters or ineligible participants, and what
should be done to ensure it never happens again,� the panel�s chairman, Rep.
James Comer of Kentucky, said in a statement Tuesday.

Republicans and Democrats did, however, find common ground last year on bills
to give the federal government more time to catch fraudsters. Biden in August
signed legislation to increase the statute of limitations from five to 10
years on crimes involving the two major programs managed by the SBA.

The extra time will help federal prosecutors untangle pandemic fraud cases,
which often involve identity theft and crooks overseas. But there�s no
guarantee they�ll catch everyone who jumped at the chance for an easy payday.
They�re busy, too, with crimes unrelated to pandemic relief funds.

�Do we have enough cases and leads that we could be doing them in 2030? We
absolutely could,� said Fruchter, the federal prosecutor in the Eastern
District of Washington. �But my experience tells me that likely there will be
other priorities that will come up and will need to be addressed. And
unfortunately, in our office, we don�t have a dedicated pandemic fraud unit.�

Congress has not yet passed a measure that would give prosecutors the
additional five years to go after unemployment fraudsters. That worries
Turner, the Labor Department watchdog. Without the extension, he told
Congress in a late May report, people who stole the benefits may escape
justice.

Sperling, the White House official, said any future crisis that requires
government intervention doesn�t have to be a choice between helping people in
need and stopping fraudsters.

�The prevention strategy going forward is that in a crisis, you can focus on
fast delivery to people in desperate situations without feeling that you can
only get that speed by taking down commonsense anti-fraud guardrails,� he
said.

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Let's go Brandon!