An Associated Press analysis found that fraudsters potentially stole more than $280 billion in COVID-19 relief funding; another $123 billion was wasted or misspent. Combined, the loss represents 10% of the $4.2 trillion the U.S. government has so far disbursed in COVID relief aid. That number is certain to grow as investigators dig deeper into thousands of potential schemes. Investigators and outside experts say the government, in seeking to quickly spend trillions in relief aid, conducted too little oversight during the pandemic's early stages and instituted too few restrictions on applicants. In short they say, the gift was just too way easy.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   The U.S. government has charged more than 2,230 defendants with pandemic related fraud crimes and is conducting thousands of investigations. Most of the looted money was swiped from three large pandemic-relief initiatives launched during the Trump administration and inherited by President Joe Biden. Those programs were designed to help small businesses and unemployed workers survive the economic upheaval caused by the pandemic. All of the theft, big and small, illustrates an epidemic of scams and swindles at a time America was grappling with overrun hospitals, school closures and shuttered businesses. Since the pandemic began in early 2020, more than 1.13 million people in the U.S. have died from COVID-19, according to the Centers for disease Control and Prevention.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 Michael Horowitz, the U.S. Justice Department inspector general who chairs the federal Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, told congress the fraud is "clearly in the tens of billions of dollars" and may eventually exceed $100 billion. But clearly it's substantial and the final accounting is still at least a couple of years away."  Before leaving office, former President Trump approved emergency aid measures totaling $3.2 trillion, according to figures from the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee. Biden's 2021 American Rescue Plan authorized the spending of another $1.9 trillion. About a fifth of the $5.2 trillion has yet to be paid out, according to the committee's most recent accounting.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           Never has so much federal emergency aid been injected into the U.S. economy so quickly. "The largest rescue package in American history," U.S. Comptroller General Gene Dodaro told Congress. The enormous scale of that package has obscured multibillion-dollar mistakes. An $837 billion IRS program, for example, succeeded 99% of the time in getting economic stimulus checks to the proper taxpayers, according to the tax agency.  The health crisis thrust the Small Business Administration, an agency that typically gets little attention, into an unprecedented role. In the seven decades before the pandemic struck, for example, the SBA had doled out $67 billion in disaster loans. When the pandemic struck, the agency was assigned to manage two massive relief efforts -- the COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan and Paycheck Protection programs, which would swell to more than a trillion dollars. SBA's workforce had to get money out the door, fast, to help struggling businesses and their employees.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 Between March 2020 and the end of July 2020, the Small Business Administration granted 3.2 million COVID-19 economic injury disaster loans totaling $169 billion, according to an SBA inspector general's report, while at the same time implementing the huge new Paycheck Protection Program. In the haste, guardrails to protect federal money were dropped. Prospective borrowers were allowed to "self-certify" that their loan applications were true. The CARES Act also barred SBA from looking at tax return transcripts that could have weeded out shady or undeserving applicants, a decision eventually reversed at the end of 2020. The office has a backlog of more than 80,000 actionable leads, close to a 100 years' worth of work.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         A 2022 study from the University of Texas at Austin found almost five times as many suspicious Paycheck Protection loans as the $20 billion SBA's inspector general has reported so far. The research, led by finance professor John Griffin, found as much as $117 billion in questionable and possibly fraudulent loans, citing indicators such as non-registered businesses and multiple loans to the same address.  Horowitz, the pandemic watchdog chairman, criticized the government's failure early on to use the "Do Not Pay" Treasury Department database, designed to keep government money from going to debarred contractors, fugitives, felons or people convicted of tax fraud. Those reviews, he said, could have been done quickly.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 For crooks, it was like tossing chum into the sea to lure fish. Many of these state unemployment agencies used antiquated  computer systems or had too few staff to stop bogus claims from being paid. The system was underfunded. Some scam artists used Social Security numbers of federal prisoners to steal millions of dollars in benefits. Ohio State Auditor Keith Faber saw trouble coming when safeguards to ensure the unemployment aid only went to people who legitimately qualified were lowered, making conditions ripe for fraud and waste. Congress has yet to pass a measure that would give prosecutors the additional five years to go after unemployment fraudsters.