Massachusetts Man Arrested for COVID-19 Fraud, Case May Hold Lessons
A Massachusetts man is accused of trying to deceive multiple government agencies out of COVID-19 assistance benefits.
Prosecutors say 41-year-old Ferris Brooks of Plymouth submitted dozens of false applications from April to December of 2020, using both his name and the names of other people.
That includes applying with a fake business name for an Economic Injury Disaster Loan with the Small Business Administration (SBA) and submitting more than 15 applications for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance using the names of others.
Prosecutors also accuse Brooks of filing ten tax returns for Economic Impact Payments in the names of others, directing payments on the claims to bank accounts in his name.
Brooks is charged with theft of government property and faces up to ten years in prison.
Agents from the Internal Revenue Service- Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI), Department of Labor Office of Inspector General (DOL-OIG) and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) assisted on the case with the COVID-19 Fraud Enforcement Task Force.
Lessons from the Brooks Case
The Brooks arrest was highlighted on LinkedIn by former Pandemic Response Accountability Committee Executive Director Bob Westbrooks, who called it “a pandemic relief fraud trifecta I haven't seen before: fraudulent Economic Injury Disaster loans (SBA) + fraudulent Economic Impact Payments (IRS) + fraudulent unemployment insurance claims (DOL/states).”
In his post, Westbrooks wrote the case shows that government agencies at both the federal and state level need to do a better job at communicating, writing that the Brooks case could have been flagged sooner if the IRS, SBA, and state agencies were more easily able to leverage each other’s data.
Even more concerning, Westbrooks wrote that the federal government has not learned its pandemic fraud lessons yet, writing that Congress “needs to permanently authorize and fund Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency’s (CIGIE's) analytics center of excellence. It is currently set to expire in 2025. At the same time, Congress needs to strengthen the authorities of the center and Treasury's Office of Payment Integrity and determine how best the two can operate in an independent yet integrated and complementary manner.”