A total of 177 Illinois state employees have been determined to have obtained Paycheck Protection Program loans based on falsified information. That’s according to the Office of Executive Inspector General, which put the dollar amount of fraud found “so far” at $4.5 million.
The OEIG released the report Tuesday. The summary shows 132 Department of Human Services employees, 25 Department of Children and Family Services employees, eight Department of Healthcare and Family Services employees, four Department of Employment Security employees, three employees each from the Department of Public Health and Department of Veterans’ Affairs and one at each of the Department of Revenue and the Department of Natural Resources have been identified “so far.”
“To date, the improper loans identified in these founded reports total more than $4.5 million in public funds,” the report said. “The OEIG’s PPP investigation project remains ongoing. These numbers do not reflect a final total of OEIG founded reports or a final total for any particular agency.”
Illinois’ OEIG investigation was initiated in 2022 to examine whether employees with the state of Illinois abused the federal taxpayer-funded program. PPP was instituted at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 to assist businesses in keeping employees paid when state governments across the country limited economic activity in an attempt to slow the spread of the virus.
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