The Great Pandemic Swindle
Some Context
In October 2022, the Project On Government Oversight published an investigation on some 2.4 million Paycheck Protection Program loans that were flagged by the Small Business Administration as warranting further scrutiny — for example, for fraud or ineligible recipients.Many of these loans — worth about a quarter of the total $800 billion lent out — were ultimately forgiven by the SBA.
A key part of this investigation was in the data POGO had obtained through the Freedom of Information Act on the flags for these loans, which the authors narrowed down and sent my way for visualizing.
My Role
I took the lead on reformatting various datasets the team sent my way, visualizing them, and helping the team determine which stories were the most useful for contextualizing this problem.I built these visualizations using Flourish, a data visualization software. There were some significant data issues I had to rectify in Excel so these would display properly, mostly due to differences in Flourish’s format and the government’s data — for example, concatenating county names, slight differences in nomenclature (e.g., “De Witt, Illinois” vs. “DeWitt, Illinois”), and handling U.S. territories (Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands.)
I also designed the investigation’s series of editorial illustrations, pulling from the data’s color scheme to tie the investigation visually together.
Hot Spots: Midwest, Puerto Rico Counties Among Those with Most Flagged Loans Per Business
I created this story series: focusing first on the continental U.S., then to Puerto Rico, and then to the Midwest.
I also helped the team in the framing for this visualization, both in suggesting what would become the title for this visual and in writing the helper text for it. I was aiming to help the audience understand what we were showing through these datasets and how to navigate this visualization.
I also helped the team in the framing for this visualization, both in suggesting what would become the title for this visual and in writing the helper text for it. I was aiming to help the audience understand what we were showing through these datasets and how to navigate this visualization.
Working from Home? PPP Recipients Flagged for Having a Large Number of Employees at a Residential Address
This slice of the data, while accounting for only 5,811 loans, was a good indicator of fraud — as it indicated flags for a large number of employees at a residential location.
Editorial Illustration Series
The data also made its way into the editorial illustrations I designed for this story, such as the color scheme, the county heat map, and some of the data the investigators had obtained.