Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) said in a statement to Breitbart News that Congress needs to empower a special inspector general to uncover more of the billions of dollars in coronavirus aid fraud.
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) last week found that the Biden-era Small Business Administration (SBA) granted 5,593 loans worth $312 million to borrowers where only owner was listed as 11 years old or younger.
“While it is possible to have business arrangements where this is legal, that is highly unlikely for these 5,593 loans, as they all also used an SSN with the incorrect name. @DOGE and @SBAgov are working together to solve this problem this week,” DOGE wrote.
Ernst, the chair of the Senate Small Business Committee and Senate DOGE chair, believes there is much more to uncover.
“As crazy as it sounds, hundreds of millions in COVID loans being awarded to kids under 11 with fake social security numbers is just the tip of the iceberg. My oversight efforts uncovered that $5.4 billion in COVID loans went to individuals using fraudulent social security numbers,” she said in a statement to Breitbart News.
SBA head Kelly Loeffler and Ernst have sought to uncover more than $200 billion in coronavirus aid fraud, which was revealed by a June 2023 SBA Office of Inspector General (SBA OIG) report.
Ernst’s office has catalogued just a few of the ways that the coronavirus aid has been abused:
While SBA ran the relief programs on a “first come, first serve” basis, the money ran out quickly, and many qualifying businesses were turned away as felons, gang members, and drug traffickers raked in cash. Some swindlers uploaded pictures of Barbie dolls as photo identification on SBA loan applications that were approved.
One alleged fraudster took home $8 million while nearly 2,000 struggling restaurants in Iowa were left empty-handed. Ernst detailed this in her report titled Small Business COVID-19 Fraud: Three Years Later State of Play – where she outlined the Biden SBA’s effort to discount the full extent of fraud and cast doubt on the legitimate estimates made by expert investigators.
The Small Business Committee chair has long called for passing her bill, the Complete COVID Collections Act, that would extend the life of the Special Inspector General Pandemic Recovery (SIGPR) after the inspector general warned in January that its authority was expiring:
The Special Inspector General for Pandemic Recovery does not have the jurisdiction to go after the fraud as described by the Business Insider article; the Ernst bill aims to fix this issue by giving the SIGPR the authority to go after the pandemic-era fraud.
By addressing the jurisdiction, compared to other bills that simply extend the SIGPR, it would prevent those committing fraud from getting away with their crimes.
The legislation to find more waste, fraud, and abuse passed out of the Small Business Committee and is backed by Senate Republicans across the political spectrum, including Sens. Todd Young (R-IN), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), James Lankford (R-OK), Josh Hawley (R-MO), Eric Schmitt (R-MO), and John Curtis (R-UT).
She added, “I am thrilled to see DOGE and Administrator Loeffler tackling the problem, but unless we pass my bill to empower SIGPR, the top pandemic watchdog, these fraudsters will likely get away.”
Sean Moran is a policy reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on X @SeanMoran3.
