Report to Congress: April 1, 2024 through September 30, 2024

Summary

The Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PRAC) Semiannual Report to Congress for April 1, 2024, through September 30, 2024. It notes the PRAC's sunset date of September 2025 and urges Congress to sustain its analytics platform. As of September 2024, the PACE is reported to have supported more than 49 law enforcement and OIG partners on 951 investigations involving nearly 23,000 subjects and an estimated fraud loss of $2.2 billion. The Fraud Task Force, with more than 50 agents from 16 OIGs, produced 27 sentencings and $14 million in restitution. The report also describes a study of unemployment insurance fraud, a five-chapter Blueprint for Enhanced Program Integrity, and reports on Springfield, MA, Coeur d'Alene, ID, and Sheridan County, NE.

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Report to Congress: April 1, 2024 through September 30, 2024

We're pleased to present the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee's (PRAC) Semiannual Report to Congress , which highlights our accomplishments between April 1 and September 30, 2024. It's been more than four years since the PRAC’s creation, and we, along with our Office of Inspector General (OIG) partners, remain committed to the mission of effectively overseeing more than $5 trillion in federal pandemic relief funds.

As we approach the PRAC's sunset date of September 2025, we also look to the future by encouraging Congress to sustain PRAC’s analytics platform. This good-government initiative has provided deep program insights, sophisticated data analytics tools, and innovative oversight models with an unbeatable return on investment for detecting and preventing fraud, waste, and abuse. We believe the time is now to preserve these PRAC innovations and apply these fraud prevention and detection tools to all federal spending.

Here are some of our accomplishments from this time period.

Highlights from the report

1. Successes of the PACE

The Pandemic Analytics Center of Excellence (PACE) developed entity resolution models to create accurate risk profiles for pandemic funds recipients and identify potentially high-risk entities such as those that received funds from multiple pandemic programs.

2. Investigating Fraud

As of September 2024, the PACE has provided investigative support to more than 49 law enforcement and OIG partners on 951 pandemic-related investigations and nearly 23,000 subjects and an estimated fraud loss of $2.2 billion.

3. PRAC Fraud Task Force

The work of the task force, composed of more than 50 agents from 16 OIGs, produced 27 sentencings and 59 years of prison time. The task force has also yielded $14 million in restitution to the government.

4. Why fraud surged in UI

In this report , we shed light on the unprecedented levels of fraud in unemployment insurance (UI) benefits. We examined various fraud schemes and identified some that were exacerbated by pre-existing weaknesses in state UI programs.

5. Public Outreach

The PRAC Executive Director appeared on Federal News Network to discuss how the PACE assisted the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation OIG in recovering $135 million in improper payments to pension plans that wrongly included nearly 3,500 deceased plan participants.

6. Website Survey

We continue to gain valuable insights into users' interactions with PandemicOversight.gov. For this reporting period, we collected feedback from our customer satisfaction survey of 5,000 visitors. On a scale of 1-5 (with 5 being the highest), 63 percent rated their experience on the website at a 4 or 5. We continue to make improvements based on the feedback we receive.

"We encourage Congress to maintain the valuable fraud-fighting tools of our data analytics center and expand its jurisdiction beyond pandemic relief funds. Without it, the federal government will no longer have an entity capable of proactively conducting cross-program, cross-agency analysis to help prevent improper payments in high-risk programs."

Michael E. Horowitz, PRAC Chair

We launched the Blueprint for Enhanced Program Integrity.

This five-chapter research project shares lessons learned and best practices to help strengthen federal programs, enhance stewardship, and ensure that taxpayer-funded programs and assistance are delivered to the communities that need them. Chapter 1 focuses on helping program administrators develop and implement programs with strong internal controls. Chapter 2 for policymakers provides strategies for protecting programs against fraud and improper payments.

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We issued reports on the impact of pandemic relief programs on three communities across the country.

Between April 2024 and September 2024, we issued individual reports for three of the six locations we had visited -- Springfield, MA , Coeur d’Alene, ID , and Sheridan County, NE . These reports focused on the specific programs and subprograms that provided emergency response funding in each of the locations.

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Previous Reports to Congress

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