Wisconsin Watch, a nonprofit newsroom, is partnering with Gigafact to produce fact briefs — bite-sized fact checks of trending claims. Sign up for our newsletter for more stories straight to your inbox.
No.
The Legislative Audit Bureau found the Department of Revenue did not follow eligibility requirements when distributing COVID-19 relief grants to 45 businesses.
The nonpartisan audit agency reviewed 172 grants out of nearly 100,000 awarded to small businesses, restaurants and lodging, representing $4.1 million out of the total $596 million.
The LAB cautioned that the review was not based on a randomly selected or statistically valid sample.
“It is not appropriate to extrapolate the results of our review to all grants that DOR awarded,” LAB wrote in the Nov. 29 report.
In a statement, the Republican leaders of the Legislature’s audit committee reiterated that the LAB’s findings are not representative of all grants awarded. Revenue Secretary Peter Barca noted the 172 grants are “less than 0.2% of those issued.”
Barca told auditors the Revenue Department “successfully stopped 28,605 fraudulent grants” and was recovering the $475,000 in improperly awarded funds.
Sources
Wisconsin Legislature: Legislative Audit Bureau: We’re All In and Wisconsin Tomorrow Programs
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: State audit says 45 pandemic grants went to ineligible businesses, a small fraction of overall assistance
WisPolitics: Sen. Cowles: Audit reviews the We’re All In and Wisconsin Tomorrow grant programs
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
- Credit should be given, in this format: “By Dee J. Hall, Wisconsin Watch”
- If published online, you must include the links and link to wisconsinwatch.org
- If you share the story on social media, please mention @wisconsinwatch (Twitter, Facebook and Instagram)
- Don’t sell the story — it may not be marketed as an individual product.
- Don’t sell ads against the story. But you can publish it with pre-sold ads.
- Your website must include a prominent way to contact you.
- Additional elements that are packaged with our story must be labeled.
- Users can republish our photos, illustrations, graphics and multimedia elements ONLY with stories with which they originally appeared. You may not separate multimedia elements for standalone use.
- If we send you a request to change or remove Wisconsin Watch content from your site, you must agree to do so immediately.
For questions regarding republishing rules please contact Andy Hall, executive director, at ahall@wisconsinwatch.org
