According to a new report, several government investigators have been baffled by the $5 trillion that Congress spent on pandemic relief operations.
The Pandemic Response Accountability Committee recently released a report that traced $2.65 billion in pandemic relief funds to six towns. It was discovered in the research that “data gaps make it difficult for taxpayers to know how much money their community received and for what purposes.” Part of the $5 trillion in federal assistance provided during the pandemic is the $2.65 billion.
“Existing gaps in federal spending data make it difficult for the oversight community, decision-makers, and American taxpayers to fully understand where the money went and how it was used,” according to the report. “Moreover, these gaps even make it difficult for program officials administering the funds to have a clear understanding of funding recipients and uses.”
The Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency has a committee called the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee that is established as part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Security Act, or CARES Act. As part of the case study, the oversight team of the committee visited the six chosen localities, which included two small to medium-sized cities, two rural counties, and two Native American Reservations. The six communities included in the study were the White Earth Nation Reservation in Minnesota, the Jicarilla Apache Nation Reservation in New Mexico, Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, Sheridan County, Nebraska, and Marion County, Georgia.
The researchers discovered that during the first 18 months of the pandemic (from March 2020 through September 2021) the 10 federal agencies covered by the review distributed nearly $2.65 billion in pandemic relief funding to the six communities through roughly 89 pandemic relief programs and subprograms. The team combined data sources from the federal, state, and local governments.
The team’s report found “persistent data gaps and data reliability issues.”
“Specifically, the time, resources, and non-public data required to identify the total amount of funding that went to the six communities illustrates the difficulty in fully understanding the recipients and uses of federal pandemic relief funds,” according to the report. “This review further demonstrates the clear need for broad government action and immediate steps to improve the transparency and accessibility of pandemic spending data.”
The team claims that the money was not easy to track.
“Data was sometimes difficult to find or unavailable. We had to use data sources that the public can’t access,” according to a summary. “One of our partners had to access five internal databases to determine the recipients in a single program. There were some programs where we don’t know how much money was either obligated or spent.”
SOURCE: PANDEMIC OVERSIGHT REPORT
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