We need fiscal responsibility and oversight. Let’s pray for our leaders.

From MoneyWise. A U.S. government watchdog has issued a “deeply disturbing” fraud alert over the widespread use of “questionable” Social Security numbers (SSNs) to get pandemic loans.

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The Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PRAC) found that 69,323 potentially fraudulent SSNs were used to obtain $5.4 billion from the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and the COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) program. …

Suspicious SSNs fell through the cracks

The Small Business Administration (SBA) launched the PPP and EIDL programs in 2020 to help small businesses and their employees recover from the economic impacts of the pandemic.

Over the pandemic, the SBA provided about $800 billion in PPP loans and over $378 billion in EIDL loans — not all of them, it would seem, to deserving businesses and individuals.

But with that much money being distributed in pandemic relief — and so quickly — oversight was a must. And so the CARES Act created PRAC for just that purpose. In a review of more than 33 million PPP and EIDL applications, the committee uncovered 221,427 potentially invalid SSNs.

Of those, 69,323 sketchy SSNs made it through the system and were used in connection with 99,180 successful loan applications, amounting to $5.4 billion that was doled out between April 2020 and October 2022.

A further 175,768 of the red-flag SSNs were used in loan applications that weren’t paid out. However, PRAC cautioned that these SSNs “could be used in a future attempt to obtain benefits from other government programs, and therefore warrant further scrutiny.” …

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(Excerpt from MoneyWise. Photo Credit: Canva)