In these days of rampant virtue signaling, politicians, corporations and socially wired individuals all try to convince you that they care the most about doing the right thing. Alas, while we’ve all been recovering from the COVID-19 crisis, plenty of old-fashioned grifters have seized the day.
On Sunday The Associated Press released a stunning investigation into pandemic fraud finding that large numbers of Americans — of all stripes, it appears — fraudulently helped themselves to colossal chunks of federal COVID-19 relief money.
Any huge program created in an emergency is bound to encounter some corrupt actors, but the scale of the fraud in this instance indicates that the federal government did a thoroughly lousy job of erecting the necessary protections as it cut check after check to the unworthy. The news agency called it “the greatest grift in U.S. history,” and that’s saying something.
The AP estimated that fraudsters potentially stole more than $280 billion in COVID-19 relief funding, with another $123 billion either wasted or misspent. Those are stunning amounts of money. And we wonder why we had inflation raging out of control.
How did this happen? Among other missteps, the AP points to a common situation where too many applicants for federal cash were essentially “self-certifying” a need that for some of them was pure fiction. In other words, the government was repeating the same mistake that many banks offering mortgages did when they offered so-called liar loans that sparked the financial crisis in the first decade of this century.
The COVID-19 fraud, it seems, was everywhere and the grift of fake businesses, stolen identities and other shenanigans ranged from epic steals to petty robbery. Take just one sample agency — Ohio’s Department of Job and Family Services. According to the AP, that overwhelmed agency reported in February some $1 billion in “fraudulent pandemic unemployment claims” and another $4.8 billion in “overpayments.” They hardly were alone: Government systems were simply incapable of rooting out many fake or excessive claims.
We also suspect that some Americans rationalized that with so much federal money sloshing around, they deserved a nice car or a new wardrobe too. Except they didn’t. Let’s hope they eventually pay the price.
In Illinois, we’ve already seen some public employees get caught due to smart government watchdogs cross-referring what they were saying on their federal applications and what they are doing in their regular course of employment.
In April, Chicago Park District investigators reported they were looking at several cases of COVID-related fraud involving dozens of employees, some of whom already had resigned. Deborah Witzburg, City Hall’s inspector general, has also said that her office still is investigating whether any city employees also bilked the so-called Paycheck Protection Program. And based on the scale of the fraud, that would still seem to be a fertile act of inquiry.
Other investigations have born fruit at the office of Chief Cook County Judge Timothy Evans (following a Chicago Sun-Times investigation), the office of Cook County Assessor Fritz Kaegi and the Cook County Board of Review, although that hardly is an exhaustive list.
For people who work in the private sector, it has been easier to escape the kind of watchdog efforts likely to result in detection. So far.
Nonetheless, last fall, then U.S. Attorney John Lausch charged seven Chicago-area residents with fraudulently obtaining at least $16 million in small business loans and grants under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (“CARES”) Act. If the AP is to believed, that is just the tip of the iceberg.
Don’t hold your breath for a full comeuppance anytime soon: The AP reports that it could take 100 years to prosecute just the good cases.
That said, who got the money is a matter of public record, in most cases at least. So there is hope that diligent investigators eventually will get to the truth in some of the most egregious cases.
Graft, alas, remains very much with us, COVID or not. We’re still reeling at the recent case of ex-Cook County Judge Patricia Martin who stands accused of defrauding Oscar Wilkerson Jr., a nonagenarian who died in February and was both a former Tuskegee Airman and a recipient of a congressional Medal of Honor.
Wilkerson’s lawyers sued, alleging that Martin (the niece of Wilkerson’s former wife) had taken Wilkerson’s money to invest in cryptocurrency for her own benefit even though that was money he needed for his care home. And on May 24, Cook County Circuit Judge Anna Demacopoulos ordered a nonresponsive Martin to cough up more than $1.2 million in damages, fees and court costs. A week later, the Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission filed a complaint accusing Martin of taking at least $246,000 from Wilkerson.
That case would be bad enough, but it’s also worth noting that Martin retired in 2020 as the presiding judge of the Cook County juvenile court’s long-troubled child protection division. This was a judge charged with the sacred task of protecting children from harm; yet she still allegedly could not be trusted to take care of the assets of a vulnerable old man.
What does all this tell us? Guard rails, followed if necessary by legal action, still are needed where large amounts of tempting cash are concerned no matter what people claim about their own virtue.
