(Washington Stand) The U.S. government loses nearly $1 trillion in emergency relief funds annually, according to experts. In a “60 Minutes” interview Monday night, Audient Group founder and former Government Accountability Office executive Linda Miller alleged that international crime rings defraud American taxpayers of billions of dollars every year.
“I believe the government is losing between $550 billion and about $750 billion a year — we’re coming up close to the $1 trillion amount — [that’s] lost every year to fraud,” Miller stated. She explained, “What we’re really talking about is nation-state actors, we’re talking about organized crime rings, we’re talking about using vast amounts of stolen American identities to monetize them for criminal activity.”
Fraud was rampant during the COVID-19 era, Miller explained. “I mean, it was like they threw money in the air and just let people run around and grab it. The most egregious part is that a lot of the people who stole that money were foreign, adversarial nation-states,” she said, estimating that over $1 trillion in COVID-19 relief funding was stolen through fraud. (Read More)