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At the time the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) released its first major assessment of federal COVID-19 spending in March, more than 400 people had pleaded guilty to defrauding the programs and another 550 had been charged with felony fraud.
The Internal Revenue Service followed with a report that it had conducted 660 investigations revealing loan, credits and payment fraud totaling $1.8 billion over the past two years.
Expect many more disclosures like those, according to the GAO report, which amplified the message delivered for a year by the Badger Institute. In the scramble to distribute trillions of dollars in a declared emergency, government at all levels sacrificed transparency and accountability to the taxpaying public.
The cost is only beginning to be realized.
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