U.S. government watchdogs remain overwhelmed in their jobs to find and retrieve stolen federal COVID-19 aid and require more money to perform their duties sufficiently, The Washington Post reported.
Congress continues to underfund and understaff some of the officials whose chief responsibility is to monitor stimulus cash, the Post reported Wednesday.
"People have a right to know how their money is being spent," Michael Horowitz, chairman of the federal government's Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PRAC), told the Post.
"Is it being spent in a way that's wasteful? Did the money go to the right place? Was it defrauded? Accountability goes with understanding where the money went."
Horowitz spoke nearly six months after he appeared before Congress to say that federal watchdog agencies needed funding to investigate how criminals already had bilked billions of dollars meant to help jobless Americans and small businesses during the pandemic.
The Post reported that the watchdogs with the largest responsibilities, and most significant financial constraints, are inspectors general (IGs), who are tasked to serve as independent voices monitoring federal spending.
"The real need for resources, to my mind is with the [inspectors general], primarily because they're so overwhelmed with trying to figure out what happened," Horowitz said, the Post reported.
According to the newspaper's analysis of budget records, five key offices have experienced a $26 million shortfall during the past two fiscal years due to lack of funding.
One example cited by the Post involved the Small Business Administration IG, whose funding was reduced despite having flagged potentially more than $4 billion in fraud targeting the country's top loan program to help small businesses.
The Labor Department IG has opened about 170,000 investigations into unemployment insurance fraud but remains "hampered" by lack of full funding.
In September, the Labor Department IG estimated $45.6 billion in unemployment benefits fraud during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Since the pandemic began in the U.S. in early in 2020, lawmakers have approved roughly $5 trillion in federal aid to individuals, families, and businesses.
Relaxed rules, as the government rushed to get money to people who needed it, contributed to criminal activities, the Post reported.
Unemployment insurance and the small-business loan program were prime targets for criminals.
Stimulus money that helped needy Americans afford the internet, also allowed for companies such as AT&T and T-Mobile to install price hikes and cut some services, the newspaper said.
The PRAC has been able to produce reports and a public dashboard for viewing broad categories of stimulus spending, but the quality of the data varies due in large part to lack of funding.
"There's enough information out there that you know in broad categories what we spent money on, and how much, roughly," Sean Moulton, a senior policy analyst at the Project on Government Oversight, told the Post.
"The problem is if you try at all to really drill down, that's when it starts to fall apart and become really problematic."
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