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COVID-19

‘Mind-boggling’: Billions gone and little to show for it years after rampant COVID fraud

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From The Center Square

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“The estimated amounts of waste, fraud, and abuse in COVID-related programs are simply … mind-boggling,” Subcommittee on Government Operations and the Federal Workforce Chairman Pete Sessions, R-Texas, said at the hearing. “Half a trillion dollars. Maybe more. Much of it lost to criminal actors and our enemies. Often using comically simple tactics.”

Years after the passage of federal COVID-era relief and the subsequent loss of likely hundreds of billions of those taxpayer dollars, lawmakers are still unsure where that money went, how to get it back, and seemingly have done little to prevent it from happening again.

Federal watchdog and other reports estimate anywhere from $200 billion to half a trillion was lost to waste, fraud and abuse across various federal and state COVID-era programs.

“Insiders, including those who worked for state workforce agencies, conspired with organized crime factions and other individuals to defraud state UI programs and the states did little to stop them,” a Republican-led House Oversight Committee report released this week said. “Some states even hired individuals convicted of identity theft to process UI claims.”

Examples like that and the scope of the amount lost was the subject of a House Oversight hearing this week where lawmakers on both sides of the aisle and experts grappled with the scope of the lost funds and what to do about it.

“The estimated amounts of waste, fraud, and abuse in COVID-related programs are simply … mind-boggling,” Subcommittee on Government Operations and the Federal Workforce Chairman Pete Sessions, R-Texas, said at the hearing. “Half a trillion dollars. Maybe more. Much of it lost to criminal actors and our enemies. Often using comically simple tactics.”

The most common among those tactics was stealing unemployment dollars doled out by the federal government during the pandemic.

One inspector general report from the Small Business Adminstration estimated at least $200 billion in taxpayer money was lost.

“We estimate that SBA disbursed over $200 billion in potentially fraudulent COVID-19 EIDLs, EIDL Targeted Advances, Supplemental Targeted Advances, and PPP loans,” the report said. “This means at least 17 percent of all COVID-19 EIDL and PPP funds were disbursed to potentially fraudulent actors.”

Nearly all of those “fraudulent actors” have so far gotten away with the theft.

Congress approved $40 million for the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, tasked with finding and preventing fraud. That committee and other investigative efforts have shown the COVID-era fraud was rampant and that little has been done to recover those funds.

That committee’s authority expires next year.

“Every dollar that goes to a fraudster doesn’t go to the small business, to the unemployed, to others that Congress were intending to help,” Michael Horowitz, Chair of PRAC, said at the oversight hearing this week. “If we want to continue to advance the fight against improper payments and fraud, we shouldn’t allow this important and fraud fighting tool to expire.”

Horowitz also said at the hearing that there is “clearly insufficient” access to data for oversight, such as accessing Social Security Administration’s death database so that payments are not sent to deceased individuals. He also pushed for his authority to be expanded to helping other agencies.

Orice Williams Brown, chief operating officer at the U.S. Government Accountability Office, also testified at the hearing that federal agencies can do more to prevent fraud of this kind. But federal agencies are not alone in the blame.

The House Oversight report released this week is called the “Widespread Failures and Fraud in Pandemic Unemployment Relief Programs” showing that states mishandled funds doled out by the federal government for unemployment insurance, sometimes with little oversight.

From the report:

The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimates 11 to 15 percent of total benefits paid during the pandemic were fraudulent, totaling between $100 to $135 billion. The Department of Labor (DOL) Office of Inspector General (OIG) estimates that at least $191 billion in pandemic UI payments could have been improperly paid, with a significant portion attributable to fraud. As of March 2023, states reported recoveries of improper payments in an amount of only $6.8 billion.

The design of the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program led to massive fraud. During the program’s first nine months, claimants did not have to provide any evidence of earnings or prior work which made the program susceptible to fraud. DOL reported that the PUA program had a total improper payment rate of 35.9 percent.

Both sides have lamented the lost taxpayer dollars, but so far little has been done to prevent it from happening again, even as Congress continues to pass multi-trillion dollar spending bills often with little time for lawmakers to review.

Lawmakers passed two bills in 2023 to increase reporting from federal agencies on fraud and to prevent those previously convicted of financial crimes from receiving certain federal payment.

The House Oversight report recommended stronger security measures, cross checking with other relevant databases, more oversight and transparency, and more documentation from benefit recipients.

“If this is not a call to action…” Sessions said at the hearing. “I simply do not know what is.”

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2025 Federal Election

Mark Carney refuses to clarify 2022 remarks accusing the Freedom Convoy of ‘sedition’

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From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

Mark Carney described the Freedom Convoy as an act of ‘sedition’ and advocated for the government to use its power to crush the non-violent protest movement.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney refused to elaborate on comments he made in 2022 referring to the anti-mandate Freedom Convoy protest as an act of “sedition” and advocating for the government to put an end to the movement.

“Well, look, I haven’t been a politician,” Carney said when a reporter in Windsor, Ontario, where a Freedom Convoy-linked border blockade took place in 2022, asked, “What do you say to Canadians who lost trust in the Liberal government back then and do not have trust in you now?”

“I became a politician a little more than two months ago, two and a half months ago,” he said. “I came in because I thought this country needed big change. We needed big change in the economy.”

Carney’s lack of an answer seems to be in stark contrast to the strong opinion he voiced in a February 7, 2022, column published in the Globe & Mail at the time of the convoy titled, “It’s Time To End The Sedition In Ottawa.”

In that piece, Carney wrote that the Freedom Convoy was a movement of “sedition,” adding, “That’s a word I never thought I’d use in Canada. It means incitement of resistance to or insurrection against lawful authority.”

Carney went on to claim in the piece that if “left unchecked” by government authorities, the Freedom Convoy would “achieve” its “goal of undermining our democracy.”

Carney even targeted “[a]nyone sending money to the Convoy,” accusing them of “funding sedition.”

Internal emails from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) eventually showed that his definition of sedition were not in conformity with the definition under Canada’s Criminal Code, which explicitly lists the “use of force” as a necessary aspect of sedition.

“The key bit is ‘use of force,’” one RCMP officer noted in the emails. “I’m all about a resolution to this and a forceful one with us victorious but, from the facts on the ground, I don’t know we’re there except in a small number of cases.”

The reality is that the Freedom Convoy was a peaceful event of public protest against COVID mandates, and not one protestor was charged with sedition. However, the Liberal government, then under Justin Trudeau, did take an approach similar to the one advocated for by Carney, invoking the Emergencies Act to clear-out protesters. Since then, a federal judge has ruled that such action was “not justified.”

Despite this, the two most prominent leaders of the Freedom Convoy, Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, still face a possible 10-year prison sentence for their role in the non-violent assembly. LifeSiteNews has reported extensively on their trial.

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COVID-19

17-year-old died after taking COVID shot, but Ontario judge denies his family’s liability claim

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From LifeSiteNews

By Clare Marie Merkowsky

An Ontario judge dismissed a liability claim from a family of a high schooler who died weeks after taking the COVID shot.

According to a published report on March 26 by Blacklock’s Reporter, Ontario Superior Court Justice Sandra Antoniani ruled that the Department of Health had no “duty of care” to a Canadian teenager who died after receiving a COVID vaccine.

“The plaintiff’s tragedy is real, but there is no private law duty of care made out,” Antoniani said.

“There is no private law duty of care to individual members of the public injured by government core policy decisions in the handling of health emergencies which impact the general population,” she continued.

In September 2021, 17-year-old Sean Hartman of Beeton, Ontario, passed away just three weeks after receiving a Pfizer-BioNtech COVID shot.

After his death, his family questioned if health officials had warned Canadians “that a possible side effect of receiving a Covid-19 vaccine was death.” The family took this petition to court but has been denied a hearing.

Antoniani alleged that “the defendants’ actions were aimed at mitigating the health impact of a global pandemic on the Canadian public. The defendants deemed that urgent action was necessary.”

“Imposition of a private duty of care would have a negative impact on the ability of the defendants to prioritize the interests of the entire public, with the distraction of fear over the possibility of harm to individual members of the public, and the risk of litigation and unlimited liability,” she ruled.

As LifeSiteNews previously reported, Dan Hartman, Sean’s father, filed a $35.6 million lawsuit against Pfizer after his son’s death.

However, only 103 claims of 1,859 have been approved to date, “where it has been determined by the Medical Review Board that there is a probable link between the injury and the vaccine, and that the injury is serious and permanent.”

Thus far, VISP has paid over $6 million to those injured by COVID injections, with some 2,000 claims remaining to be settled.

According to studies, post-vaccination heart conditions such as myocarditis are well documented in those, especially young males who have received the Pfizer jab.

Additionally, a recent study done by researchers with Canada-based Correlation Research in the Public Interest showed that 17 countries have found a “definite causal link” between peaks in all-cause mortality and the fast rollouts of the COVID shots as well as boosters.

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