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The Small Business Administration’s (SBA) oversight office released new findings, estimating that tens of billions of dollars disbursed by the agency through pandemic loans programs intended to help small businesses were paid to “potentially fraudulent actors,” The Hill reported. The SBA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) said in a report on Tuesday that the agency disbursed about $1.2 trillion in COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) and Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) funds during the pandemic. But the OIG found “at least 17 percent of all COVID-19 EIDL and PPP funds were disbursed to potentially fraudulent actors.” That includes over $136 billion in EIDLs and $64 billion in PPP funds, the report found. The government watchdog said it identified multiple schemes that criminals used to steal taxpayer funds and saw some using the dollars to purchase “luxury homes, gold coins, diamonds, jewelry, luxury watches, fine imported furnishings, designer handbags, clothing, and a luxury motorcycle.” “Since SBA did not have an established strong internal control environment for approving and disbursing program funds, there was an insufficient barrier against fraudsters accessing funds that should have been available for eligible business owners adversely affected by the pandemic,” the OIG stated in the report, while also citing the “rush” by the agency to “swiftly disburse COVID-19 EIDL and PPP funds” for businesses in response to the pandemic.

Eviction moratoriums were put in place across the U.S. at the start of the pandemic in 2020 to prevent displacement and curb the spread of the coronavirus. Most expired long ago, but not in Oakland or neighboring San Francisco and Berkeley, all places where rents and rates of homelessness are high, the Associated Press reported. While it's more common to see tenants converging on city halls in California to demand greater protections, in Oakland and surrounding Alameda County small-property landlords staged protests earlier this year demanding an end to the moratoriums. Many of the landlords were Black, like Haile, or Asian American, and they said the eviction bans had saddled them with debt and foreclosure worries while their tenants, who have jobs, live rent-free. They scolded elected leaders for allowing tenants to self-certify that their inability to pay was tied to the pandemic. Alameda County let its moratorium expire at the end of April. In Oakland it ends July 15. Tenants must start paying rent in August in most cases, but cannot be evicted for back rent if their financial hardship was caused by the pandemic. Moratorium backers called the bans a lifesaver that kept countless families housed and off the streets. They said low-income residents are still struggling from the pandemic and need protections from ruthless landlords.

Supply chain pressures cooled again in May, New York Fed data showed, in a development that further eased what had been one of the key factors that had helped drive surging inflation pressures around the world, Reuters reported. The New York Fed said on Tuesday that its latest Global Supply Chain Pressure Index stood at -1.71, from the revised -1.35 for April. The report said that supply chain pressures were below average in all regions of the world considered in the index. The bank tied reduced pressure in May to diminished contributions from Great Britain backlogs and Taiwan delivery times. Euro area delivery times and backlogs put upward pressure on the index, however. After peaking in December 2021 at a reading of 4.31, the New York Fed index has been steadily retreating as supply chain kinks generated by the coronavirus pandemic have gotten worked out. The index tipped into negative territory in February in a sign that supply chain pressures had largely resolved themselves and has moved steadily lower since that point.

In early February, federal prosecutors in Utah accused Zachary Bassett and Mason Warr of cheating the United States government out of millions of dollars. The accounting firm they operated had submitted more than 1,000 fraudulent tax forms to the Internal Revenue Service on behalf of businesses trying to claim pandemic-era stimulus funds, the prosecutors said, according to the New York Times. COS Accounting and Tax shut down later that month, leaving businesses and taxpayers that had paid the firm to help them claim federal money trying to figure out what had happened and why they were suddenly receiving audit notices from the I.R.S. Amid the onset of the pandemic in 2020, as large swaths of the economy went into lockdown, Washington set up various programs to help keep businesses and their workers afloat. Among them was the Employee Retention Credit, a tax benefit that was created as part of the initial $2 trillion pandemic relief legislation. The program offered businesses thousands of dollars per employee if they could show that COVID-19 was hurting their bottom lines and that they were continuing to pay workers. The money was intended to be a lifeline for struggling companies. Instead, it has become a magnet for fraud, creating a cottage industry of firms that market themselves as tax credit specialists who can help clients — even those who don’t actually qualify for the money — reap huge refunds from the I.R.S. Although the public health emergency is over, taxpayers can continue to apply for the tax credit until 2025. That has fueled a run for the money and the proliferation of financial service providers, who often charge hefty upfront fees or take cuts of around 25 percent of any tax refund.

House Republicans demanding spending cuts in exchange for raising the nation’s debt limit have rallied around a seemingly straightforward proposal: recalling billions of dollars in coronavirus relief funds that Congress approved but have not been spent, the New York Times reported. Top Republicans regard the idea of rescinding unspent pandemic emergency money — an amount estimated to be between $50 billion and $70 billion — as an easy way to save money while avoiding more politically perilous options like cutting funding for popular federal programs. On Wednesday, Speaker Kevin McCarthy highlighted the measure when he finally unveiled House Republicans’ proposal to raise the debt limit for one year in exchange for a series of spending cuts and policy changes. The party plans to vote on the legislation next week. But going after the leftover money scattered across the patchwork of government programs used to dole out the relief funding — dozens of different accounts — is easier said than done. And even if House Republicans can find a way to identify and get their hands on the comparatively small sums of leftover money, it would do little to shrink the nation’s $1.4 trillion deficit. Additionally, the federal budget analysts who calculate the deficit have already accounted for the fact that some of the money Congress allocated for pandemic relief programs will likely never be spent.