Exclusive — Sen. Joni Ernst: Bureaucrats ‘Asleep at the Wheel,’ Let Fraudsters Take $79 Billion in Coronavirus Aid Without Using Basic Safeguard to Prevent Fraud

Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) told Breitbart News that coronavirus aid fraudsters were able to bilk taxpayers out of $79 billion in coronavirus aid because the government did not use basic safeguards to ensure eligibility.

“Bureaucrats were asleep at the wheel and let COVID fraudsters take taxpayers for a very expensive ride, while small businesses in need were left out in the cold,” Ernst told Breitbart News in a written statement after a Pandemic Response Accountability Committee report found that $79 billion in coronavirus aid fraud could have been prevented had there been basic vetting measures before aid was sent to applicants.

“If anyone had checked whether applicants had the correct name, birthday, or even were alive, the American people could have saved $79 billion. We cannot allow this to happen. I am proud to lead the DOGE In Spending Act to put basic safeguards in place for government spending to effectively eliminate all improper and fraudulent payments in Washington,” she continued.

Simple questions to verify eligibility include:

• Is the SSN valid?
• If valid, does the name associated with the SSN on the application match SSA records?
• If valid, does the date of birth associated with the SSN on the application match SSA records?
• Is the SSN on the application associated with a deceased individual?

“The codes provided by SSA indicated that the identifying information (SSN, name, DOB) provided by applicants in almost 24,000 of the 662,000 [recipients analyzed] did not fully match the information in SSAs records, indicating potential fraud,” the report noted, adding a table with a breakdown by verification code.

Following the release of the report Ernst introduced a bill, the DOGE in Spending Act, on Friday that would require basic questions to be asked to eliminate improper payments government-wide.

Ernst’s legislation would require the Treasury Department to have a description of each payment, link it to a budget account, and verify the payment against government databases to ensure accuracy and eligibility. It would also require every expenditure to be made public on USASpending.gov, with annual updates for transactions.

The coronavirus aid fraud is not the only instance of improper government payments.

The Veterans Affairs Department Office of Inspector General discovered that improper payment issues resulted in veterans with serious disabilities, such as amputations, were short-changed up to $4,000 in their monthly disability checks. The Hawkeye State senator has exposed how government employees potentially double-dipped by collecting paychecks from the taxpayers while also receiving payments at the same time.

DOGE is working to consolidate the federal government’s 47 financial management systems, many of which cannot interact with each other. Information sharing between these financial systems requires printing out information on paper and then manually entering the information into the other system.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a study that found lax oversight by the Small Business Administration of hundreds of billions of dollars in coronavirus aid loans and grants, which Ernst said exhibited either “jaw-dropping incompetence or willful negligence.”