Feds Uncover $1.2 Billion Suspected COVID Contract Fraud

The General Services Administration (GSA) has uncovered over $1.2 billion in suspected fraud in five COVID-19-related contracts, according to the agency.

Some federal contractors are accused of receiving funds on these contracts even though the COVID-19 national emergency ended in 2023, the GSA said in a Sept. 24 statement. Fraudsters have continued to “weaponize outdated emergency contracts to abuse taxpayer dollars,” GSA Administrator Edward C. Forst said in the statement.

According to Forst, the fraud was identified in Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) contracts. It was uncovered as part of GSA’s collaboration with HHS under the direction of White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud.

The task force’s executive director, Scott Brady, said that $1.22 billion in suspected fraud was identified in total. Moreover, $41 million in additional suspected fraud was stopped across the contracts.

“GSA will continue to work with the Vice President’s task force to stop improper payments, refer suspected fraud to law enforcement, and fight to recover every dollar,” Forst said.

Last month, GSA announced it had uncovered over $13 billion in suspected fraud committed by federal contractors since March this year. This was the largest suspected fraud bust in the history of GSA in terms of total dollar amount and the number of contractors involved.

GSA said it was carrying out a thorough review of COVID-19 spending. Suspected fraudsters are being referred to the Department of Justice or the Office of the Inspector General for investigation.

According to the agency, the fraud was identified as part of its collaboration with the White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud.

Since January 2025, the task force has discovered around $260 billion in fraud, according to its website.

“What we’re going to actually do is force the bureaucracy to take this seriously and work together as political principles to make sure that we stop allowing fraudsters to steal the American people’s money,” Vance said at the time.

“This effort will fundamentally always have a limitation unless our colleagues in the House and the Senate are working with us,” Vance said at the time. “We don’t want the next administration ... to undo all the incredible work that we’ve been doing.”

Vance also called upon Congress to make sure that people convicted of fraud get longer prison terms, reflecting the seriousness of these crimes.

At the same event in August, Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson, co-chair of the task force, said that punishments associated with most fraud crimes are relatively low.

Meanwhile, following the Trump order establishing the task force, the Department of Justice launched the National Fraud Detection Center last month, together with other federal agencies and partners that aims to identify fraud across various taxpayer-funded programs, the FBI said in a Sept. 17 statement.

Instead of assessing investigations in isolation, the center can help connect cases, identify patterns, and dismantle criminal networks through the use of multi-agency data and artificial intelligence.

“Fraudsters don’t work within borders, they don’t work on jurisdictions; they work on opportunities,” Kevin Gallagher, head of the financial crimes section of the FBI’s Criminal Division, said in the statement. “And so we need to be able to have that data across all of our agencies in order to identify trends and more strategically pursue large, enterprise investigations.”