US pandemic accountability committee gets funding to continue work to 2034
The US Congressional oversight committee set up to provide oversight of government spending related to the COVID-19 pandemic will continue its work until 2034 after it was provided with additional funding.
The Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PRAC) was established as part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, a US$2.2 trillion economic stimulus bill passed in Donald Trump’s first term in March 2020 in response to the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States.
The committee was formed as part of the CARES Act to oversee the spending in the act, and other related emergency spending bills.
In a recent analysis, the committee estimates that the US government could have saved almost US$80bn if it had implemented data analytics to prevent pandemic-related fraud.
Now, the committee will be funded until 2034 after the tax and spending bill passed by the US Congress earlier this month provided US$88m to continue its work. The committee has 10 inspectors general, and has been overseeing spending across programmes, coordinating between watchdogs, setting up a data analytics centre, and investigating fraud.
As well as coordination and oversight responsibilities, the PRAC has established the Pandemic Analytics Center of Excellence (PACE), a data analytics platform for fraud detection.
The PRAC said its latest analysis “demonstrates how cross-agency partnerships and innovative data analytics… can improve programme integrity by verifying identities and flagging potential anomalies in applications before taxpayer funds are sent to fraudsters”.
Read more: Data analytics could prevent billions in fraud, says US oversight committee
Further developing data analysis capacities
Under the new funding deal, the PRAC will further develop its data analytics capabilities with the objective of being able to prevent money being distributed to fraudsters.
PACE randomly sampled 662,000 identity records from 67.5m funded applications across major pandemic relief programmes in its most recent analysis. It asked the Social Security Administration (SSA) to verify whether the social security number (SSN) was valid; if the name and date of birth associated with an SSN matched SSA records; and if the SSN on the application was associated with a deceased individual.
This process flagged nearly 24,000 of the 662,000 sampled records as potentially fraudulent, meaning that either the SSN was never issued or didn’t match the applicant’s name or date of birth, “indicating that they were either stolen or being used without authorisation”. In addition, over 11,000 sampled records were associated with individuals who were deceased as of the date SSA responded to the PRAC’s request. These loans were excluded because some of the individuals may have been alive at the time of application.
“Our oversight work during the past five years has detailed federal agencies’ inability to use data to effectively prevent pandemic-related fraud,” said PRAC chair Michael E. Horowitz. “By contrast, the PRAC’s sophisticated data analytics capabilities allow us to look across federal agencies and programmes to identify potential fraud before it occurs by comparing agency and other data with applicant-provided information, such as IP addresses, dates of birth, bank accounts, and home addresses.”
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