“On the Holmes Front,” with Frank Holmes
Some investigations take longer than others. While the hunt for the White House cocaine wrapped up in a matter of days, the Biden administration just announced it’s going to take longer for you to find out just how much fraud was perpetrated against the American people in the name of COVID-19.
How long?
100 years, according to a new government report.
When the government ordered businesses to shut down, it went into overdrive printing and borrowing money to keep the businesses afloat. Politicians forced Americans to stay home from work, then billed them to bail out their employers through the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and the Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL).
Unfortunately, bureaucrats were so busy writing checks, they didn’t check on who received them—and the COVID-19 program became a a grift of epic proportions.
“In the rush to swiftly disburse COVID-19” funds, the government “calibrated…weakened or removed the controls necessary to prevent fraudsters from easily gaining access” to your taxpayer funds, the report says. “The allure of ‘easy money’ in this pay and chase environment attracted an overwhelming number of fraudsters.”
Overwhelming is the word.
The Small Business Administration, which oversaw the main COVID-19 relief projects, has already found $200 billion in fraud—but its Office of Inspector General (OIG) admits, that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Inspectors say they’re so buried looking into COVID-related financial chicanery that they won’t be able to get to the bottom of it for at least a century!
“Of the more than 250,000 OIG Hotline complaints we have received since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, our data analytics team has identified more than 90,000 actionable leads, which represent more than 100 years of investigative case work,” says a new report written by SBA Inspector General Hannibal “Mike” Ware.
As usual, the numbers are actually worse than the government lets on.
The office says it “has investigated over 1,000 cases” or possible fraud “since March 2020,” and has “about 570 open investigations” at the moment. That’s 1,570 investigations in 28 months—or 56 cases a month.
At that rate, officers will finally finish looking into those 90,000 leads by the year 2157—134 years from now.
Even at that rate, we’ve learned a lot about Washington’s shocking incompetence.
At least one in every six bank transfers the government made due to COVID claims was totally bogus. The SBA paid out $1.2 trillion in a matter of months. Even looking at just a fraction of those cases, the slow-moving government probe has uncovered $200 billion of likely fraud. “That means at least 17 percent of all COVID-19 EIDL and PPP funds were disbursed to potentially fraudulent actors,” says a report summary.
The Horn has detailed some of those cases of fraud in the past—including millions of your taxpayer dollars that the government sent to businesses that never even existed.
Worse yet, all that spending didn’t help a lot of poor people—not as much as letting them keep their jobs would have.
At least 200,000 businesses closed, anyway—especially small businesses, Mom and Pop shops that operated on a shoestring budget, support from the local community, and a lot of prayer.
But Amazon more than tripled its profit during the pandemic, from $2.5 billion to $8.1 billion.
The small business collapse trickled down to hurt workers, too. As late as last June, 6.2 million Americans said they still could not find work, or had to work fewer hours, because of the pandemic.
That’s just the beginning of the way Biden’s COVID economic policies hurt you. Joe Biden and a Democratic Congress kept government spending levels ripping along at pandemic levels after even Biden admitted, “The pandemic is over.”
All that spending led to the highest level of inflation in 40 years. That, with a gasoline pipeline crackdown and anti-rural American policies, led to double-digit increases in the price of household staples including gasoline, home heating fuel, and groceries.
But wait, there’s more.
Biden then told the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates, over and over again, for the first time in decades, making it harder for those unemployed and underemployed Americans to afford the loans they had to take out to stay on their feet.
Now, we find out, maybe tens of thousands of people gamed the system and pocketed our money—and we won’t know how many for 100 years…and that’s just the financial fraud.
The SBA report is just more confirmation that COVID-19 was the biggest fraud ever perpetrated on the American people.
Frank Holmes is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”