The U.S. Secret Service said that nearly $100 billion has potentially been stolen from COVID-19 relief programs designed to help individuals and businesses harmed by the pandemic, the Wall Street Journal reported. The funds have “attracted the attention of individuals and organized criminal networks” world-wide, the agency said in a news release, though its estimate of stolen benefits represents just a fraction of the trillions of dollars in government relief provided since last year. The Secret Service said that it would work closely with a variety of federal agencies — including the Labor Department and Small Business Administration, which have key roles tracking and administering relief funds — to investigate and recover fraudulently disbursed funds. The Secret Service said that its estimate is based on public reports issued by internal government watchdogs, with the bulk of the potentially misused funds stemming from fraud tied to unemployment insurance. Those analyses are based on 2020 activity and could overstate the amount of actual fraud or stolen money, in part because they also include mistaken payments to ineligible recipients and not necessarily bad actors. The Secret Service issued a revised statement on Wednesday afternoon warning of “potential fraudulent activity nearing $100 billion,” amending an earlier release that said “stolen benefits” and pointed to estimates totaling more than $100 billion. In a separate estimate released last week, the Labor Department said about $87 billion in unemployment benefits might have been paid improperly, “with a significant portion attributable to fraud.” The department administers federal components of aid programs in addition to compiling data on state-run benefits.
