On Friday on Fox Business Network’s “Mornings with Maria,” SBA Administrator Kelly Loeffler said her agency was suspending all funding to the state of Minnesota in the wake of a multimillion-dollar fraud scandal plaguing the state.
Loeffler said there was no evidence of “guardrails” for taxpayer dollars distributed in Minnesota.
“[W]e are suspending funding to the state of Minnesota,” Loeffler said. “I wrote a letter to Governor Tim Walz that said last week we would be withholding millions of dollars from the state because there are simply no guardrails on taxpayer dollars. But the bigger picture is here, as soon as we found out following Thanksgiving weekend that there was massive fraud in Minnesota, we immediately went to look at pandemic-era programs, which we know were rife with fraud.”
“And so, we went and investigated, only took a couple of days to find about $3 million in fraud from the indicted individuals that were listed, about 80 individuals,” she continued. “So, we dug further, we picked up about 13,000 loans that were flagged for fraud. And as you mentioned, about 7,000 individuals in Minnesota now know that they will not be able to ever get loans from the SBA or disaster recovery funds because they have defrauded the federal government, and our taxpayers are holding them accountable. And we will be sending those files over to federal law enforcement because this isn’t just action to stop them from getting SBA support, but also to make sure that there are consequences for them there, that there are prosecutions and there’s accountability.”
Follow Jeff Poor on X @jeff_poor
Read the full article here