By Associated Press’s DAVID A. LIEB
Missouri’s Jefferson City (AP) The U.S. Treasury is attempting to recover millions of dollars in COVID-19 pandemic relief payments from hundreds of local governments that failed to disclose their spending.
As part of the American Rescue Plan, which was authorized by Congress and President Joe Biden in 2021, the federal government gave $350 billion to state, municipal, territory, and tribal governments. From the biggest state to the smallest village, over 30,000 governments were to receive a portion.
Depending on their population and the amount of funding they received, governments were expected to submit quarterly or annual progress reports and had until the end of 2024 to commit the funds for particular projects. Most people obeyed. In January, however, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that approximately 1,000 governments, primarily smaller ones, had not submitted any reports to the Treasury about their use of $139 million.
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The Treasury sent letters to the local governments in an attempt to recover the funds, according to a GAO report that was made public last week.
In a letter linked to the GAO report, the Treasury stated that as of June 24, 740 local governments had filed reports and would no longer be obligated to reimburse their payments. Thirteen governments gave the Treasury their money back. 235 local governments, however, had yet to submit a report or reimburse their pandemic relief contributions.
The Associated Press was informed by the GAO that it does not currently possess a list of the precise countries that have failed to comply with the reporting obligations. An AP request for a list of the 13 governments that returned their money and those that have yet to disclose their use of it has not received a response from the Treasury.
Concerns regarding countries’ failure to reveal how they spent their pandemic relief monies have been voiced previously.
In October 2023, the GAO revealed that over 3,500 local governments who had failed to submit progress reports on their pandemic relief money had received noncompliance notifications from the Treasury. At the time, Treasury refused to give the AP the noncompliance notices. In order to get copies of the violation notifications and other correspondence, the AP filed a Freedom of Information Act request in January 2024. That request has yet to be honored by the Treasury.
According to the GAO’s most recent report, the Treasury’s ability to ascertain whether local governments are allocating the cash for permissible purposes is being hindered by their failure to provide progress reports on a regular basis.
