Dec. 31, 2021 - Epoch Times
04:06
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Have you ever listened to young people talk about how we need more government-funded programs in this country? | |
| And as you're listening to them talk about it, how the government needs to take over, let's say, a function that's currently being handled by the private sector, and you hear them and you think to yourself, gosh, would the government really be more efficient at this particular task? | |
| Or would they be more likely to lose $100 billion without even knowing where it went? | |
| Well, it appears that the answer to that question has been settled. | |
| Because according to estimates that were just released by the Secret Service, at a minimum, $100 billion have been stolen from COVID relief programs that were set up by the government to help both businesses as well as private citizens who lost their jobs due to the pandemic. | |
| Now to start with, if you're like me, you might be wondering and asking yourself why exactly the Secret Service is the one that's conducting this investigation. | |
| Shouldn't they be busy guarding the President? | |
| And it turns out that the reason for this, and I didn't know this before looking it up, but the Secret Service, they actually specialize in financial fraud, in addition to their better known role of protecting the President. | |
| In fact, they recently even appointed a new National Pandemic Fraud Recovery Coordinator, We're good to go. | |
| Which sounds like a lot, which it is. | |
| However, consider that that number only represents about 3% of the total $3.4 trillion that were dispersed by the government. | |
| Here's in fact what Mr. | |
| Dotson said in his statement. | |
| I have been in law enforcement for over 29 years and worked some complex fraud investigations for 20 plus years and have never seen something at this scale. | |
| Furthermore, during an interview with CNBC, Mr. | |
| Dotson said that the ease of obtaining these funds has made fraud a significantly easier enterprise for criminals to commit. | |
| Here's specifically what he said on this front. | |
| There's no doubt that the programs were easily accessible online, and so with that comes the opportunity for bad actors to get into that mix. | |
| It was necessary to try to get these funds out to people that were truly hurting and no fault of anybody. | |
| Regardless though, he also said that at this very moment, the Secret Service has about 900 active investigations that they are looking into in terms of fraud. | |
| Here's what he said. | |
| Quote, So there's many different patterns and investigative intelligence that we developed that I can't really go into. | |
| But we've mapped out kind of some of the different characteristics of different groups. | |
| Now, this announcement from the Secret Service actually falls very much in line with what the Labor Department released in a statement back in March. | |
| Back then, the Labor Department's Inspector General, he released a report in which he said that at least $89 billion of the estimated $896 billion in unemployment program funds could have been, quote... | |
| Now, in terms of actually retrieving this money, well, last week the Justice Department came out and they said that their fraud division, they have already prosecuted 150 defendants in over 95 different criminal cases and that they have seized in total over $75 million in cash, which they claim came from this type of COVID relief fund fraud. | |
| Which sounds all well and good, but consider that $75 million is a far cry from $100 billion. | |
| Here's in fact what Mr. | |
| Roy Dodson said on this front. | |
| Can we stop fraud? | |
| Will we? | |
| No. | |
| But I think we can definitely prosecute those that need to be prosecuted and we can do our best to recover as much fraudulent pandemic funds that we can. | |
| Although one thing that Mr. | |
| Dodson did not elaborate on is how much it will actually cost the government to both investigate as well as prosecute all of these fraud cases. | |
| And frankly, it's exactly stories like these that make me question why I pay taxes at all. | |
| Regardless, if you'd like to read more about these fraud investigations that are currently being undertaken by the Secret Service, I'll throw the links to several articles into the description box below this video for you to check out. |
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