Appearing after Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin was grilled in a Senate hearing, MSNBC's Stephanie Ruhle ripped into the Trump administration official for saying it would be too much work to go after businesses committing COVID-19 aid fraud if they received $2 million or less.
Speaking with host Craig Melvin, Ruhle -- who was once a hedge funder on Wall Street -- recalled how businesses turned around and used tax breaks for buy up their own stock instead of putting money into the economy and fretted that there is now little oversight over how federal funds being distributed will be used.
'I would be asking, these big dollars that you're giving to big business, what restrictions are you putting on them?" Ruhle explained. "Case in point: the 2017 tax cut. Remember, we're going to give this big tax cut, make sure workers keep their jobs, it's going to help people in the middle class, they're going to get a pay increase and companies are going to repatriate those dollars and move their operations to the United States."
"We saw that happen a little bit. but what we really see happen was companies do what companies do; focus on their bottom line, their executives and their shareholders," she added.
"You've been diving into how some of that paycheck protection money has been spent. what have you found?" host Melvin asked. "Do we know anything about where this money is going so far?"
"So we know because the biggest businesses that are publicly-traded had to disclose their names because that's how the SEC works," she explained. "Other businesses haven't. In any other previous program, they'd disclose the tax IDs of every single loan. As of last Thursday, Secretary Mnuchin announced that any loan that's less than $2 million, they don't have the bandwidth to pursue for fraud."
"They don't have the ability? Fine. This is the United States government; they keep saying we'll get to it, we'll get to it. You can say, 'oh, less than $2 million.' You have over 3 million of the loans out there," she exclaimed. "If you knew you wouldn't get audited, apply for a loan under $2 million and nobody would look under the hood -- there's a good chance you might do that. What we need is transparency."
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