GAO questioning hundreds of COVID-19 funeral awards
The Federal Emergency Management Agency may have been double-billed for the funerals of hundreds of people who died of COVID-19, the Government Accountability Office said in a new report.
The GAO identified 374 people who died and were listed on more than one application that received an award from the COVID19 Funeral Assistance fund. That amounts to about $4.8 million in assistance that could have been improper or potentially fraudulent payments, the report said.
FEMA spokesperson Jaclyn Rothenberg said Wednesday that this was not an example of largescale fraud and the amount of funeral assistance identified as at-risk was relatively small, with FEMA’s “multi-layered internal quality controls and fraud controls” resulting in improper payments of less than 1%.
“Unfortunately, fraud, particularly identity theft, is common. FEMA has controls in place to detect instances and can and will prosecute anyone who would apply for assistance fraudulently,” Rothenberg said in a statement.
FEMA told the GAO that some duplicative applications were incorrectly awarded funeral assistance due to processing errors, not fraud, and benefits were not actually paid twice in some of the cases, the report said.
The cases have been sent to the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General to consider whether to launch any fraud investigations, said Chris Currie, who leads GAO’s work on emergency management and disaster response and recovery, and Rebecca Shea, who oversees GAO audits to identify fraud, waste and abuse.
Shea said they could not
confirm whether FEMA did or did not pay twice in all of the cases. She said she thinks fraudsters likely targeted the fund and some of it is data entry mistakes.
As of late last year, FEMA had awarded about $1.5 billion in assistance in response to about 235,000 applications for nearly 237,000 people who died due to COVID-19, the report said. While the duplicates are less than 0.2% of those applications, the GAO said the findings are significant due to the possibility of improper payments and potential fraud in this disaster and future disasters.
There were only about 6,000 applications for funeral assistance after other disasters in the decade before the pandemic. Use of the program “exploded” since Congress expanded it for COVID-19 by making the $50 billion in the Disaster Relief Fund available for such assistance, prompting GAO to do a forensic audit, Currie said.
Most of the 374 deceased individuals identified on more than one application were listed by different applicants, the GAO said. The GAO provided three examples to FEMA. According to the report, FEMA said there were processing errors and started trying to recoup
money in two of the cases in January.
About 50 deceased individuals were listed on multiple applications from the same applicant, the report said. FEMA initially said there were duplicates in the system due to a change in geographic coding and only one of the applications was paid in each case, but when the GAO provided examples, FEMA confirmed the duplicative applications were paid, the report said.
The GAO also said it identified 400 applications that received more than the maximum benefit of $9,000 for each person who died — some up to nearly $20,000 — for another roughly $4.7 million in assistance that could’ve been improper or potentially fraudulent payments.
There were thousands of awards given in instances where there was a missing or invalid death date according to the data FEMA provided, the GAO said. Sometimes a deceased person was listed as the applicant or the date listed for the decedent was before the pandemic started, raising questions about how FEMA determined eligibility in those cases, Shea said.
“That shouldn’t be happening,” she said. “You know, dead can’t apply for benefits.”