The Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PRAC) is touting the success of its fraud-fighting abilities and calling on Congress to permanently establish its Pandemic Analytics Center of Excellence (PACE) before the center’s scheduled sunset date of Sept. 30, 2025.
In a recent semiannual report to Congress, which highlights the PRAC’s accomplishments between April 1 and Sept. 30, 2024, the PRAC spotlights the successes of its data analytics center known as the PACE.
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 – said the PACE “has demonstrated a strong return on investment.”
As of September, the PACE has provided investigative support to more than 49 Federal law enforcement and Offices of Inspectors General (OIG) partners on 951 pandemic-related investigations, with nearly 23,000 subjects and a potential fraud loss of $2.2 billion.
Additionally, the report notes that in April, the PACE assisted the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation OIG in recovering $135 million – more than three times the $40 million in funding that Congress provided to operate the PACE from 2021 to 2025.
“The PACE has proven to be extraordinarily successful in identifying improper payments and fraud in pandemic relief programs, allowing Offices of Inspectors General (OIG) partners to assess applications for fraud indicators before funds are disbursed,” Michael Horowitz, chair of the PRAC, said in the report.
“If Congress allows the PRAC and this data analytics function to sunset, the Federal government will no longer have an entity capable of proactively conducting cross-program, cross-agency analysis to help prevent improper payments in high-risk programs,” Horowitz stressed.
The report notes that the PACE is “a critical asset” used by law enforcement to identify issues such as identity theft and fraud across multiple pandemic-related programs. During this reporting period, the tool helped to generate leads for the Department of Justice COVID-19 Fraud Enforcement Task Force and other law enforcement entities.
Also during this reporting period, the PRAC said it completed the development of the Analytic Center Pilot – a data sharing and risk analytics product for the oversight community.
“The product has received positive feedback. Users reported significant time savings to perform data search and validation tasks using the pilot. Users also reported that the data sharing approach is considered the ‘gold standard’ for sharing data among agencies,” the report says.
Finally, Horowitz points out that in its 2024 report on potential cost savings in the government, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimated that sustaining the PACE could result in a billion dollars or more of financial benefits annually.
“We submit this Semiannual Report to Congress at a crucial time in the lifespan of the PRAC. With nine months remaining until our sunset, we encourage Congress to maintain the valuable fraud-fighting tools of our data analytics center and expand its jurisdiction beyond pandemic relief funds,” Horowitz concluded. “The time is now for the Federal government to expand preparations to better safeguard future emergency and annual Federal spending.”
