By DAVID A. LIEB, Related Press
JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — The U.S. Treasury is looking for to recoup COVID-19 pandemic reduction funds from tons of of native governments that obtained thousands and thousands of {dollars} however by no means complied with necessities to report how they used the cash.
The federal authorities distributed $350 billion to state, native, territorial and tribal governments as a part of the American Rescue Plan accredited by Congress and President Joe Biden in 2021. Greater than 30,000 governments, from the most important state to the tiniest city, had been to get a share.
Governments had till the tip of 2024 to obligate the cash for particular tasks and had been speculated to file both quarterly or annual progress reviews, relying on their inhabitants and the way a lot cash they obtained. Most complied. However as of January, about 1,000 largely smaller governments had did not file any reviews with the Treasury detailing how they used a complete of $139 million, in line with an evaluation by the U.S. Authorities Accountability Workplace.
A GAO report launched final week mentioned the Treasury despatched notices to the native governments looking for to recoup the cash.
As of June 24, a complete of 740 native governments subsequently filed reviews and can now not be topic to repaying their funds, the Treasury mentioned in a letter hooked up to the GAO report. 13 governments returned their funds to the Treasury. However that also left 235 native governments that had by no means filed a report nor returned their pandemic reduction funds.
The GAO instructed The Related Press it doesn’t have checklist of the particular governments that haven’t complied with the reporting necessities. The Treasury has not responded to an AP request for an inventory of the 13 governments that returned their funds and people who nonetheless haven’t reported how they used it.
This isn’t the primary time considerations have been raised about governments failing to reveal how they used their pandemic reduction funds.
The GAO reported in October 2023 that the Treasury had despatched noncompliance notices to greater than 3,500 native governments that hadn’t filed progress reviews on their pandemic reduction funds. The Treasury at the moment declined to offer the noncompliance letters to the AP. So the AP in January 2024 submitted a Freedom of Data Act request looking for copies of the noncompliance notices and associated correspondence. The Treasury nonetheless has not fulfilled that request.
In its most up-to-date report, the GAO mentioned the failure of native governments to file common progress reviews is limiting the Treasury’s capacity to find out whether or not they’re spending the funds on allowable makes use of.
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