It’s not exactly stunning that State Auditor Shad White is reporting that hundreds of millions of dollars of federal stimulus money were misspent in Mississippi.
He and everyone else involved in monitoring government spending knew to expect this when Washington turned on the taps for at least two years and flooded families, businesses and government entities with trillions of dollars to try to avoid a financial cataclysm as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Earlier this year, NBC News reported that somewhere between $90 billion to $400 billion had been stolen nationally from a COVID unemployment relief program that was intended to help those who lost their jobs as a result of the massive shutdowns. Another $80 billion was pilfered from the Paycheck Protection Program, which was intended to reward employers for not laying off workers. And yet another $80 billion was potentially stolen from a separate COVID disaster relief program.
And these are just the stolen funds, not those that were squandered or spent in ways that did not comply with government regulations. That’s probably worth hundreds of billions of dollars more.
So, although we shouldn’t ho-hum about White’s audit report this week, nor should we feign shock. Of course Mississippi was going to screw up — as probably every state did — when given a boatload of money with little oversight and pressure to get it circulating as quickly as possible.
White’s report focused in particular on these areas of misspending for the year ending June 30, 2021:
- The Mississippi Department of Employment Security disbursed almost a half-billion dollars in unemployment benefits to people who were not eligible.
- The Mississippi Division of Medicaid, as the prior year’s audit had previously noted, continued to provide benefits to people who probably did not qualify.
- The Mississippi Department of Education allegedly distorted the bid process to give the edge to a vendor on a contract for laptop computers used in distance learning. MDE denies the allegation.
State and federal officials have been and will continue to try to get some of the stolen money back. There have been prosecutions of schemers who set up sham companies to get PPP money, and civil demands have been made against some rich people who enrolled in Medicaid, the government insurance program for the poor.
These watchdog efforts will never come close to getting it all back, though. The errors and abuse are too gargantuan and the investigative resources too thin to make more than a modest dent in the problem.
The federal government made a conscious decision that it was more important to get the money out quickly than correctly. It’s not surprising that state governments took that as their cue to do the same.
