Federal officials announced a sweeping crackdown on fraud tied to the Paycheck Protection Program, the PPP, saying the Justice Department and the Treasury have referred more than half a million borrowers for collections and prosecutions over $22 billion in suspected PPP fraud. The announcement came from the administration's anti-fraud task force, which officials said is working state by state to recover stolen money and prosecute those responsible. They cast the effort as part of a wider campaign to root out abuse of the pandemic-era loan program.
As part of the effort, officials announced suspensions for 140,000 borrowers across California, Minnesota and Maine, an amount they said totals $9 billion. The suspensions are aimed at borrowers flagged in connection with the suspected fraud, and they represent one of several batches of action the task force said it is rolling out across multiple states. Officials presented the figures as evidence of the scale of the problem they say they are now confronting.
Officials also announced suspensions for more than 27,000 Ohio borrowers tied to $1.1 billion in suspected PPP fraud. The Ohio numbers were presented as the latest step in a state-by-state approach, with officials framing the action as part of a broader push to correct what they described as past abuses of the program. They said the same methodical, state-level scrutiny would continue to be applied elsewhere in the country.
The task force, officials said, is exposing fraudsters, making them return what they stole and sending them to jail. The Trump administration, one official said, would uphold law and order and not protect criminals at the expense of honest, hardworking Americans. The administration is also putting up what officials called new guard rails to prevent future fraud, even as it moves to correct the past, going state by state to unwind earlier abuses of the program.
The Small Business Administration was cast as central to the effort. One official said there is no fraud too small, and that the SBA is proud to help deliver justice on behalf of what were described as America's job creators. Officials credited SBA Administrator Loeffler with doing more work than almost any agency in the federal government to combat fraud, both by making sure money never reaches fraudsters and by recovering funds that had already gone out the door.
FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson said President Trump had decided to declare war on fraud, and that assembling a team of state, local and senior federal officials had only been possible because of the president's leadership. Ferguson said Trump had put Vice President Vance in charge of the anti-fraud task force, calling the vice president the point of the spear in the war on fraud and crediting him with the determination and energy to carry it across the entire federal government alongside state partners.
Ferguson described the campaign as a two-pronged attack on fraudsters. The Justice Department, together with state governments and the Department of Homeland Security, would put fraudsters in jail, while federal agencies would install safeguards so that the money never reaches the fraudsters in the first place. As part of that agency push, Ferguson said the HHS Office of the Inspector General, led by March Bell, had in coordination with the task force decertified Hawaii's Medicaid Fraud Control Unit.