COVID Fraud
As expected, Cong. Liz Cheney was defeated last night. She doesn’t have a future with the current GOP.
Gov. Greg Abbott rolled out his first ad a couple of days ago. It is like they are introducing a new fella to folks. He is not recognizable. Won’t work.
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Back in 2020, in the early days of COVID-19, when the federal government started handing out billions of dollars in aid and loans to businesses to save jobs, my banker sent me an application to see if I was interested. The first question on the form was if my business had been adversely impacted by COVID. Nope and that was the end of that.
We have all heard and read about the stories of fraud related to the COVID money from the feds. Here is a sub-headline in today’s New York Times and the story is also in the Chron:
Investigators say there was so much fraud in federal Covid-relief programs that — even after two years of work and hundreds of prosecutions — they’re still just getting started.
Here is the Chron hard copy headline:
Prosecutors wading through tidal wave of pandemic fraud
The story by Pulitzer Prize winner David Fahrenthold says that money was sent to farms that turned out to be front yards. 342 whose names on the application was “N/A.” He calls it “one of the largest frauds in American history.”
So far, 1,500 folks have been charged with fraud and 450 convictions.
The feds are sorting through “2 million potentially fraudulent loan applications.”
The statute of limitation on pandemic fraud cases was recently changed from 5 years to 10 years.
Good luck.
What about the COVID funds that state governments diverted to stuff like building prisons.
Meanwhile, closer to home, this is a headline from a front-page story in today’s Chron:
Landlord that got $1M in COVID funds, then failed to pay water bill, fights evicted tenants in court
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Movie director Wolfgang Petersen left us a few days ago. He made some very entertaining flicks. “Das Boot” about the German U-Boat in World War II was his most acclaimed. I also liked “Air Force One,” “In the Line of Fire,” “Outbreak,” and “The Perfect Storm.”
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We lost another game we should have won. Frustrating to say the least.