A new report from the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) and the IBM Center for The Business of Government is calling on Congress to make permanent the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PRAC), as well as its Pandemic Analytics Center of Excellence (PACE) to prevent fraud in emergency funding.
NAPA and IBM published the report – A Prepared Federal Government: Preventing Fraud and Improper Payments in Emergency Funding – on Aug. 15 with several recommendations that Congress and Federal agencies can use to ensure the integrity and protection of funds distributed in emergency situations, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
One of the report’s key recommendations to Congress is to make both the PRAC and PACE permanent.
The report explains that the PRAC – which Congress created as a part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act in 2020 to help combat COVID-19 fraud – created the PACE in early 2021.
As of June 2023, the data platform had provided investigative support to over 40 Federal law enforcement and Office of Inspector General (OIG) partners and has led to the recovery of an estimated $2.1 billion in fraudulent funds.
More recent estimates suggest PRAC used the data platform to uncover about $5.4 billion in fraudulent loans.
Despite the PRAC’s success, Congress has not extended the group’s five-year life. This means the PRAC and the PACE will sunset in September 2025 unless Congress passes legislation to extend them.
“Legislation could make permanent these resources that are so critical to providing current and emergency funding support,” the report says. “This would allow for additional resources during times of emergencies, and ensure that technology, investigative capacity, and data systems are ready and enabled. Congress could consider the use of advanced technologies for automated internal controls, pre/post award validation, or payee certification.”
For some background on the recommendation, the report explains that the PRAC was modeled after the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board. This board was created in 2009 “to independently oversee the roughly $800 billion in economic stimulus provided in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to address the Great Recession.”
Similar to the PACE, the board created a cloud-based data analytics function called the Recovery Operations Center (ROC). However, Congress let the ROC sunset in 2015 along with its parent Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board.
“Congress and the administration allowed the ROC to sunset in 2015. A functioning (and mature) analytic capability would have undoubtedly enabled the early identification of pandemic fraud activity,” the report says.
NAPA and IBM are not the first to call on Congress to make the PACE permanent. The Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency (CIGIE) issued a similar call last month.
“As the PACE has demonstrated, data analytics capabilities are powerful tools for OIGs to detect and prevent fraud. Many smaller OIGs do not have the resources necessary for antifraud analytics,” CIGIE Chair Mark Lee Greenblatt, who also serves as the inspector general at the Department of Interior, told members of Congress on July 23.
Members of Congress and Michael Horowitz, chair of the PRAC, have also voiced their support to make this data platform permanent before the PRAC comes to an end.
Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., in April introduced the Government Spending Oversight Act to enact the White House’s call to expand and make permanent the PACE. In March, Sens. Gary Peters, D-Mich., and Mitt Romney, R-Utah, introduced a Senate version of that bill.
“It is critical that the Inspector General community maintain the data analytics capability of the PRAC beyond the PRAC’s scheduled sunset date of September 30, 2025, so that the Inspector General community has an effective analytics platform to oversee federal spending,” PRAC Chair Michael Horowitz said in favor of the bill. “It would be a wasted opportunity to allow this fraud fighting tool to expire, as happened with the Recovery Operations Center in 2015.”
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) also called on Congress last fall to establish a permanent analytics center of excellence to help the oversight community better identify improper payments and fraud.
