White House downplays Secret Service estimate of COVID fraud

The White House down- played a statement by the U.S. Secret ervice that nearly $100 billion at mini- mum has been stolen from COVID-19 relief programs, saying Wednesday that the estimate is based on old reports.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki, when asked to comment on the figure, said, “There is no new research, data or analysis of fraud here.” The Secret Service told The Associated Press on Tuesday that the estimate is based on Secret Service cases and data from the Labor Department and the Small Business Administration.

An agency spokesperson said Wednesday that they were not amending a state- ment on their website, but did add a clarifying note to explain the figure is based on reports from the Labor Department and the Small Business Administration and that the Secret Service was not producing a new report.

“There isn’t a correction to be made, we just explicitly posted on the release’s webpage the same info we discussed yesterday,” Justine Whelan, a spokesperson for the Secret Service, wrote in an email Wednesday.

Psaki said “there was just an adding up” of two old reports of well-known chal- lenges involving small busi- ness loans and unemployment insurance payments. “It’s also important to note that even those two older analyses combined payments that include mistakes in over and under payments but it was a reference to two older IG reports.”

The Secret Service didn’t include COVID-19 fraud cases prosecuted by the Justice Department in its estimate Tuesday.

The COVID-19 relief programs were set up to help businesses and people who lost their jobs due to the pandemic.

Roy Dotson, the new national pandemic fraud recovery coordinator for the Secret Service, discussed the fraud in an interview Tuesday. While roughly 3% of the $3.4 trillion dispersed, the amount stolen from pandemic benefits programs shows “the sheer size of the pot is enticing to the criminals,” Dotson said.