Officials with FEMA approved massive amounts of unallowed COVID-19 funeral expenses, including “boat purchases” for families to spread the ashes of loved ones at sea, according to an internal audit.
The newly released review said that the Federal Emergency Management Agency OK’d expenses typically rejected and even handed over more than the $9,000 maximum allowed for funerals during the early days of the coronavirus crisis.
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Overall, auditors are questioning $26.9 million in FEMA funeral payments.
The agency was supposed to limit payments to expenses deemed “serious needs and necessary expenses,” but often rubber-stamped the bills it received, said Homeland Security’s inspector general’s office.
It even paid many double billings because it set up no “guard rails” to block fraud, the inspector general said.
For example, the agency’s own rules for crisis-time funerals reasonably allowed for funding obituaries, flowers, register books, catering services, and transporting people to cemeteries.
But the inspector general said the agency went much further during the crisis, also paying expenses submitted for “portraits, funeral jewelry for survivors, memory T-shirts/blankets, travel or boat purchases intended to scatter ashes outside of a memorial service, perpetual care of burial grounds, and items purchased for individuals attending the funeral or service, such as travel costs, clothing, and hotel costs.”
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The emergency agency also overpaid expenses capped at $9,000 to the tune of nearly $760,000.
In its audit, the inspector general said that the COVID funeral program at FEMA was its biggest ever and clearly more than it could handle. It spent over $2.5 billion on 389,000 COVID-related funeral applications compared to an earlier high of “$2.6 million on 976 funeral assistance applications to pay for funeral costs of victims of Hurricanes Irma, Harvey, and Maria in 2017.”
In response, FEMA nitpicked some of the inspector general’s recommendations but generally began putting in place policies and guidance to prevent overspending on funeral costs in the future.
