U.S. federal official warns of 191 bln USD in COVID-19 unemployment aid misspent: media

NEW YORK, Feb. 9 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. government may have misspent roughly 191 billion U.S. dollars in pandemic unemployment benefits, a top federal watchdog told Congress on Wednesday, as Washington continues to uncover the vast and still-growing extent of the waste, fraud and abuse targeting coronavirus aid.

"The new estimate -- computed by Larry D. Turner, the inspector general of the Labor Department -- galvanized House Republicans as they intensified their scrutiny of the roughly 5 trillion dollars in emergency funds approved since the start of the crisis," reported The Washington Post.

Opening the inquiry, Smith described the problems plaguing unemployment insurance as the "greatest theft of taxpayer dollars in American history."

The money helped rescue the economy from the worst crisis since the Great Depression, but "it also invited an unprecedented wave of theft and abuse, as criminals seized on the government's generosity -- and its race to disburse aid -- to bilk state and federal agencies for massive sums," said the report.

Top watchdogs told the House Ways and Means Committee that they still cannot compute the total amount of federal COVID aid subject to fraud and abuse, but Turner's testimony noted that the country's misspending on unemployment benefits, in particular, may be far greater than previously known, it added.