Legislation pending in the Senate would establish a Government Spending Oversight Committee as a follow-on to the PRAC. Image: Jason Raff/Shutterstock.com
By: FEDweek StaffAn interagency task force overseeing spending in pandemic relief programs has urged continuing and expanding its work beyond its expiration next September, saying the capabilities it has built should “transition from fighting pandemic-related fraud to preventing and curbing waste in other government spending programs.”
The Pandemic Response Accountability Committee in its latest semiannual report pointed especially to its the Pandemic Analytics Center of Excellence, which supports fraud investigations and uses those insights to inform audits and prepayment controls to prevent fraud. “The deep program insights, sophisticated data analytics tools, and innovative oversight models the PRAC created can be expanded to government spending outside of pandemic relief, should Congress act to sustain PRAC capabilities past our scheduled sunset in September 2025,” it said.
“The time is now to preserve these PRAC innovations and apply these fraud prevention and detection tools to all federal spending,” it said, adding that if the capabilities had been in place at the onset of the pandemic in early 2020, “we would have been able to conduct critical data analysis before payments were made to help prevent billions of dollars of wasted pandemic relief funds through improper payments and fraud.”
Legislation (S-4036) pending in the Senate would establish a Government Spending Oversight Committee as a follow-on to the PRAC, tasked with preventing and detecting waste, fraud, and abuse and mitigating risks that cross agency boundaries in general. Its jurisdiction would include oversight of other laws enacted in recent years such as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, as well as longstanding programs where pandemic spending audits have pointed to deeper problems, such as unemployment compensation and SBA loans.
The PRAC added that cooperation with agency IG offices and law enforcement agencies has resulted in “criminal charges against more than 3,500 defendants for losses of over $2 billion, civil enforcement actions resulting in more than 400 civil settlements and judgments of over $100 million, and over $1.4 billion seized or forfeited.”
The report also urged extending the statute of limitations on fraud investigation of pandemic-related programs such as unemployment insurance, which also is to expire in September 2025.
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