Watchdog Launches Bailout Fraud Tracking Map

WASHINGTON, D.C. – This morning, Accountable.US launched a Bailout Fraud Map that will track reports of abuse and waste in the Trump administration’s Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). This new endeavor joins the government watchdog’s COVID Bailout Tracker, a website launched earlier this year that tracks PPP spending by industry, loan amount, location, name, congressional district, and more.

“It is hardly surprising that each passing week brings additional evidence of waste, fraud, and abuse in the Paycheck Protection Program,” said Kyle Herrig, president of Accountable.US. “The Trump administration failed to design and implement a program that would help actual small businesses and their workers. Instead, it cut corners and kept the American people in the dark. In the end, the wealthy and well-connected were showered with our tax dollars and fraudsters took advantage of the troubling lack of transparency.”

Earlier this month, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis released a report detailing the troubling pattern of fraud in Trump’s PPP. The report revealed that a whopping 3 billion taxpayer dollars may have been subjected to abuse, fraud, and waste in the program while hundreds of thousands of small businesses, many Black- and other minority-owned, have permanently shuttered.

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