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Idaho's U.S. Attorney and IRS criminal investigation officials believe a new COVID-19 fraud task force will have cases for years to come.

Weymouth: Largely, the types of cases that the COVID fraud task force takes on really has nothing to do with politics. So, we want to send that message and recover the money for the taxpayers. We have a very open discussion about that to ensure that doesn’t happen. The amounts in the fraud are a little smaller. If you took the money that was for your employees, and you bought a fancy car, you did something wrong. Josh Hurwit was a federal prosecutor in the office of the U.S. We take a set of facts that justifies an investigation, and we follow where it leads. That’s how we’re generating leads, and then we get leads from members of the community, from financial institutions, from other businesses that have been victimized in some way. We take that very seriously, that type of fraud. The U.S. Hurwit described that example as a “COVID testing fraud scheme, coupled with money laundering, coupled with a more traditional sort of embezzlement, wire-fraud-type scheme.” Almost immediately, he began working together with Hurwit on a COVID-19 fraud case: an investigation into a human resources manager whose employer, Fry Foods, operated a plant in Ontario, Oregon — just over the Oregon-Idaho border — that experienced a coronavirus outbreak in spring 2020 and arranged for employees and their families to receive COVID-19 tests.