From New York Times, I'm Michael Bavaro. This is a daily.

Good morning. Today we are announcing charges against 47 defendants.

Last week, a grand jury indicted dozens of people in Minnesota for stealing nearly a quarter of a billion dollars from a COVID relief program.

Their goal was to make as much money for themselves as they could, while falsely claiming to feed children during the pandemic.

The scheme that began with a simple idea in March of 2020 grew to become the largest pandemic fraud in the United States.

According to my colleague, David Ferrenthold, it's the latest and most glaring evidence yet that when it comes to pandemic aid, the United States government made it shockingly easy to commit fraud.

It's Tuesday, September 27th.

David, this is your first time on the daily. I actually first met you at the Washington Post when we were young reporters. Now we're both at the Times.

And you have become over the past few months of your career here, the pandemic era fraud reporter at the Times.

And I kind of want you to explain how it is that that became your unofficial beat.

Well, like many beats, it started with one really good story. So I came to the Times in January with a beat to cover nonprofits. I wanted to investigate a reporter writing about nonprofits.

And it just happens as I settled into this beat in the first couple weeks of January and I was looking for a nonprofit story to write.

The FBI rated a huge number of offices connected to a nonprofit. And as I began to learn about that story and hear about the fraud, this nonprofit was alleged of committed, the dollar amounts blew me away tens of millions of dollars.

And it led me back to a pandemic relief program. And that was sort of my entree to this world and the huge amounts of money and unfortunately, the huge amounts of fraud that were in it.

And when you say huge amounts of fraud, what are you talking about? What's the scale of this?

I mean, one thing I've had trouble with is trying to find a comparison. You know, when you write about the fraud that happened against pandemic programs starting in 2020, you know, it's hard to think of any other episode in at least recent American history where so many people stole so much from the US government or so many people just make it more broad.

So many people broke federal law all at the same time.

Well, let's talk about how it is that that happened that fraud became so right within federal programs designed to help Americans get through one of the worst kind of economic catastrophes of modern times, which is, you know, the pandemic basically shutting down the US financial system.

So you have to go back to March 2020, nothing that any of us really wants to do, right? Put yourself back in March 2020 so much of the economy was shutting down overnight. The government congress is looking for a way to provide financial help to businesses to people that were hurt by this.

And so there's a beginning of this outpouring of federal money that eventually came to five trillion dollars and that went in all kinds of different directions. There was eight to governments, eight to hospitals, eight to feeding programs, but the programs were the sort of most notable frauds occurred were three that were aimed at very broad swaths of the general population to have them existed before but in a sort of more structured limited way and that was the federal unemployment benefits.

And then there was a something called the economic injury disaster loan program before the pandemic. This was a small business administration loan program that was available. Say a hurricane hit your town or flood hit your county.

There would be limited areas declared to be disaster zones. The government would come in and give loans to people, you know, with the idea of rebuilding your business after knocked out by a flood.

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