Tag Archives: Allison Riggs

Where Your Taxpayer Money Has Gone

Posted on by

On Sunday, Just the News posted an article a federal task force tasked with tracking COVID-19 assistance fraud.

The article reports:

In a new investigation, a federal committee tasked with tracking COVID-19 assistance fraud found tens of thousands of dishonest or erroneous Paycheck Protection Program applications.

The Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PRAC) report, released this month, revealed more than 40,000 instances when applicants for more than $860 million in taxpayer-funded PPP loans “significantly misrepresented their incomes.”

The Small Business Administration, which distributed the PPP loans, allocated more than $1 trillion in taxpayer-funded pandemic assistance to more than 10 million small businesses.

A recent report from the Government Accountability Office showed that nearly 2 million potentially fraudulent SBA applications – including the 40,000 PPP applications – still require investigation, as The Center Square reported.

PRAC said it achieved its findings by comparing the reported incomes of sole proprietor PPP applicants with the reported incomes of applicants for Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) assistance grants using the same personally identifiable information.

Data analysts found “significant [income] misrepresentations…where the derived income for PPP applicants was at least 10 times greater than the income reported to HUD by housing assistance recipients.”

The article concludes:

Since the pandemic, when the federal government cumulatively spent $5 trillion in COVID-19 related aid, lawmakers and organizations have held oversight hearings into at least $200 billion lost to fraud, only $5 billion of which has been recovered.

Most of that fraud was preventable, according to PRAC and other watchdog groups.

“We hope that by sharing this potential fraud scheme with the public and the oversight community we can alert (1) Offices of Inspectors General (OIGs) to be on the lookout for similar cross-program schemes, (2) program implementers to build better internal controls and checks upfront to mitigate this risk, and (3) policymakers to consider issues related to cross-agency risks including income verification,” PRAC concluded.

I realize that in terms of the overall budget, $5 billion is a drop in the bucket. However, there seem to have been a number of ‘drops in the bucket’ that were fraudulent. It is very obvious that the government needs much better oversight on how it spends its money.

To add to the story, The Daily Haymaker reported on Monday that the The Southern Coalition for Social Justice may have received funds from the Covid-19 assistance programs that they were not entitled to during the time that North Carolina Superior Court Judge Allison Riggs served as the organization’s “chief counsel for voting rights” and “co-executive director for programs.” The Daily Haymaker is looking for an explanation of why the funds were received when the math indicates the organization was not entitled to them.

This Is Necessary, But It Shouldn’t Be

Posted on by

In North Carolina, we still don’t have the results from the state’s Supreme Court election in 2024. At issue are 60,000 ballots that were not properly or completely filled out. I don’t like the idea of disenfranchising people, but ballots should be properly filled out in order to be counted.

On Friday, Breitbart reported:

A North Carolina appeals court has ruled that more than 60,000 voters who voted in the state’s Supreme Court election in November 2024 must verify that they are eligible to vote.

The ruling from the appeals court ordering “more than 65,000 voters” to prove their eligibility comes after Judge Jefferson Griffin, who ran against North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs in November, challenged the results of the election, according to NBC News.

Per the outlet, voters “now have 15 business days to provide state elections officials with the necessary proof of identity that would verify their votes,” and voters who do not respond “will not have their votes counted in the race.”

“The inclusion of even one unlawful ballot in a vote total dilutes the lawful votes and ‘effectively disenfranchises’ lawful voters,” the panel of three judges wrote. “Post-election protests protect against this risk of vote dilution by enabling candidates and voters to rigorously investigate the election process, identify and challenges unlawful ballots, and ensure those ballots are not counted.”

Including an unlawful ballot is just as bad as not including a valid ballot. We need to get our elections squared away.

The article notes:

Griffin’s “legal argument centers on a claim” thousands of people who voted in the election “were ineligible to vote, mostly because they did not provide proof of identity,” through either a Social Security number or a driver’s license, according to the New York Times.

North Carolina has voter ID laws. Those laws need to be followed.