A Small Govt Agency Saved Taxpayers’ Millions, Now Congress' Inaction May Shut It Down

By Seamus Hughes and Peter Beck

Editor’s Note: The following piece is based on a review of more than forty criminal cases, hours of congressional hearings, thousands of pages of court records including many that have not been reported on previously, and dozens of interviews with individuals tasked with investigating government waste, fraud, and abuse. To support this type of reporting, please consider a paid subscription.

$10.6 million to a business with one employee. $7.6 million for a venture capital firm with a falsified payroll. And $341,205 to a cohort of inmates incarcerated in Virginia who filed fake unemployment claims. All told, a small federal agency housed in a six-story building in Virginia has uncovered tens of millions of dollars in pandemic funding fraud and has since recovered more money than it costs to run its investigations. But the agency, the Special Inspector General for Pandemic Recovery (SIGPR), is set to shut down by a previous legislative mandate exactly when hundreds of millions of dollars in pandemic loans will come due, meaning it will be able to identify further massive fraud right as it loses its remit to pursue it. 

Multiple congressional offices contacted for this article would not commit to pushing through legislation this Congress to renew the agency, with one congressional staffer calling it “too small [a] ball” of a legislative priority to spend political capital on but lamenting the inaction as a “real missed opportunity” to save taxpayer money.

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