Had it been around in 2020, it could have flagged tens of billions before payouts, PRAC tells Congress

A fraud-detection AI model trained on COVID-19 loan data could have flagged potentially tens of billions of dollars in payments before they went out, reducing the feds' pay-and-chase cleanup, the US government's Pandemic Response Accountability Committee told Congress on Tuesday.

Hindsight is 20/20, of course, and the roughly five million Small Business Administration COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan applications used to train PRAC's "Fraud Prevention Engine" were only available after the programs were already up and running, by which point billions of dollars had been paid out and later identified as potentially fraudulent.

Regardless, PRAC executive director Ken Dieffenbach told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee at a Tuesday hearing that it's time to put those lessons to work to prevent other cases of government fraud, something that the Trump administration and Republican congressional leaders ostensibly care a great deal about.

"The time is now ...