Government Accountability Office (GAO) officials told lawmakers at a House Small Business Committee hearing on March 6 that the Small Business Administration (SBA) still needs to implement key management improvements for COVID-19 relief programs to prevent further fraudulent activity. “Although SBA helped millions of small businesses with its pandemic relief programs, our concerns about [implementation […]

As the Federal government is looking to recover and make sense of the rampant unemployment insurance (UI) fraud seen during the COVID-19 pandemic, experts today told members of Congress that the government is in dire need of a technology overhaul to keep up with fraudulent actors who are leveraging emerging technologies such as AI to steal taxpayer money. […]

The Department of Justice (DoJ) announced on Wednesday that it has seized over $1.4 billion in COVID-19 relief funding stolen by criminals since the start of the pandemic, with over $200 million recovered in the past three months. […]

Mask

The Biden administration said today it is creating a new Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy (OPPR) to lead and coordinate Federal government efforts to prepare for and respond to any future threats similar in scope to the coronavirus pandemic. […]

The Small Business Administration (SBA) Office of Inspector General (OIG) issued a new report today estimating that of the $1.2 trillion SBA disbursed through its pandemic assistance loan programs, over $200 billion was potentially fraudulent. […]

Telehealth
CDC

As the COVID-19 public health emergency (PHE) is set to end next week on May 11, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky warned that this also means the end of data collection and sharing efforts that many Americans have come to expect from the agency on pandemic-related data. […]

healthcare cyber-min

The COVID-19 pandemic allowed the Federal government to speed up its AI data integration tools in a way that would have never been possible if it were not for the “all hands on deck” approach, according to Greg Singleton, chief artificial intelligence officer at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). […]

Mask

President Joe Biden signed a House bill on Monday that officially ends the COVID-19 national emergency, first enacted by the Trump administration in 2020. The national emergency was originally set to expire on March 1. […]

military healthcare, veterans healthcare

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is looking for legislative assistance from Congress to ensure that the agency can continue to provide care to veterans via telehealth appointments. […]

The Biden-Harris administration released a three-part proposal on March 2 asking Congress for $1.6 billion to help provide Federal agencies and local governments with more funding to handle pandemic-related fraud claims, modernize identity verification systems, and support victims of identity theft. […]

Senate hearing Congressional-min

A group of Republican senators sent a letter this week to Attorney General Merrick Garland and Labor Secretary Marty Walsh asking for progress on the government’s efforts to prevent fraudulent COVID-19 funding claims, and to recoup any of the billions of dollars of relief funding estimated to have been stolen by fraudsters. […]

Mask
Health Data

From the very beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, public health officials understood that using data to gather insights from otherwise inert information across the entire health ecosystem would improve public health outcomes, but raising the value of that data requires a lot of work, according to several public health officials. […]

A new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) finds that the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) spent the majority of its $36.7 billion in COVID-19 relief funding to address three key areas – with digital services and IT efforts being two of them. […]

vaccine

As the nation prepares to roll into colder weather months amid a still-uncertain picture for the coronavirus, the Federal government has a message for all employees: take a half day off on us, and get a COVID-19 booster shot. […]

Considering the nearly three-year COVID-19 pandemic that has had a chokehold on the United States and exposed vulnerabilities in the nation’s ability to operate digitally, one government watchdog is urging Federal officials to overcome their challenges in how they manage public health data. […]

Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., reintroduced the Chai Suthammanont Remembrance Act for the third time in hopes that the bill designed to protect Federal employees during health emergencies will finally pass the Senate. […]

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) is pushing the General Services Administration (GSA) to share data that GSA is in the process of collecting on how Federal agencies are sizing up post-pandemic on-site workspace demand. […]

Amid evolving workplace changes following the worst portion of the COVID-19 pandemic, experts from the General Services Administration (GSA) are encouraging Federal agency leaders to ensure that future workplace change decisions be grounded in agency missions. […]

Mask
COVID-19
CDC
Federal money spending government

House Government Operations Subcommittee Chairman Gerry Connolly, D-Va., said today he is preparing legislation that aims to reduce the Federal government’s ballooning improper payments rate – which amounted to at least $281 billion in fiscal year 2021 and was greatly exacerbated by fraud in connection with COVID-19 relief programs including unemployment insurance (UI) administered by states whose IT systems were overwhelmed by demand. […]

Mask
1 2 3 9

Categories