Naftali Harris joined Andreessen Horowitz general partner, Alex Rampell, and Bharat Ramamurti, a member of the COVID-19 Congressional Oversight Commission, to discuss fraud associated with the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) on today’s episode of the a16z podcast.
It’s estimated that the government lost at least $100M due to fraud associated with the PPP program. The SBA’s fraud hotline has received over 42,000 reports to date about COVID cheating and mis-use. By contrast, in all of 2019 they received less than 800.
Naftali, Alex and Bharat discuss the conditions that lead to fraud in the PPP program, the types of fraud schemes used, and ideas on other ways the government could tackle identity verification and funds transfer in similar programs in the future.
The full podcast is available here.