Companies Need to Focus On Compliance to Protect Against Aggressive Post COVID-19 White-Collar Prosecution

It's a well-established pattern. When Washington infuses the American economy with massive amounts of financial assistance to weather a crisis, as it did with the $2.2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act, its investigative apparatus ramps up to combat fraud and misuse of those funds. A 21st century example was the creation of the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which was a special investigative entity that investigated and ferreted out fraud within one of the government's program used to help the economy recover from the 2008 subprime mortgage debacle. Here, shortly after Attorney General Merrick Garland took office in 2021, the Justice Department warned that anyone using the global pandemic to "scam and steal from hardworking Americans" would be found and prosecuted.

In the first few months of 2022 alone, the agency announced developments in more than 50 COVID-19 fraud cases, from sentencings to guilty pleas and settlements. A dozen of them were in the first week of February, including the guilty plea of a former St. Paul, Minnesota, business owner who pleaded guilty to fraud charges in a scheme that netted $841,000 from the Small Business Administration's Paycheck Protection Program.