Sen Joni Ernst demands federal employees who stole COVID funds be fired trends now
At the height of the pandemic, thousands of federal employees wrongly applied for and received COVID-related unemployment checks and business loans - GOP Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa is calling for each of them to be fired.
The federal government doled out over $5 trillion to fight off the economic downfall brought on by Covid-19, including about $716 billion in state-administered unemployment benefits.
A report by the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, led by Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General Michael Horowitz, found that thousands of federal employees had applied and been approved for pandemic loans that were intended for small businesses through the Paycheck Protection Program.
Thousands of others had collected unemployment even as they stayed on the government payroll. About three dozen government staffers even applied for the benefits through their work computer.
Sen Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) pointed to a report from the Department of Homeland (DHS) Security Inspector General's office finding that some 2,000 DHS employees have been paid more than $2.6 million in fraudulent unemployment benefits.
The committee's Pandemic Analytics Center of Excellence (PACE), built a database to compare pandemic loan applications filed with the Small Business Administration and run it up against a list of government employees to find leads to investigate.
'So far, this analysis has helped six agency OIGs match tens of thousands of employees with SBA loans for which they were not eligible,' read a PACE report submitted to Congress last month.
Ernst pointed to a report from the Department of Homeland (DHS) Security Inspector General's office finding that some 2,000 DHS employees have been paid more than $2.6 million in fraudulent unemployment benefits. The OIG had found that 900 DHS employees were ineligible for the jobless benefits they claimed and another 900 were potentially ineligible.
Nearly three dozen employees filed unemployment claims from DHS systems, suggesting they were on the job while they were applying for the free cash.
Some 336 of the employees claiming to unemployed were
