As much as $5.4 billion worth of COVID-19 aid may have been disbursed to businesses with ineligible Social Security numbers, according to a top watchdog group overseeing pandemic funds.

The potentially swindled money largely stemmed from the Paycheck Protection Program and the Economic Injury Disaster Loan pandemic measures that rolled out over a trillion dollars in loans to financially starved companies, the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PRAC) told the Washington Post.

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During the pandemic, the Small Business Administration was tasked with overseeing the disbursement of COVID-19 aid to businesses. PRAC has been studying the relief funds and found that SBA did not adequately root out invalid Social Security numbers from large swaths of applications.

The watchdog group reviewed over 33 million applicants and unearthed over 221,000 ineligible numbers, including instances where the information given did not line up with proper names or birth data, according to the report.

Over 25% of applications that used those questionable Social Security numbers were approved for relief between April 2020 and October 2022 and received at least $5.4 billion in loans. Already, the SBA has given total or partial forgiveness to 93% of its PPP beneficiaries, though it is not clear how many recipients with dubious Social Security numbers received forgiveness, per the report.

A bevy of other investigations has found that pandemic relief measures were a hotbed for fraud and swindlers. For instance, last year the Department of Labor's Office of the Inspector General estimated that roughly $45.6 billion in unemployment aid may have been swindled by scammers who filed claims in multiple states or with identities of dead people.

PRAC was formed under the CARES Act in 2020, which green-lit the first blockbuster pandemic relief programs totaling around $2.2 trillion in March 2020.

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In total, there was over $5 trillion in federal aid approved since the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020, including the PPP and EIDL programs. House Republicans are slated to hold their first hearing this week to scrutinize how the pandemic aid was distributed.

Pandemic relief began under former President Donald Trump and stretched into the Biden administration. The programs are credited with helping the United States avert an economic catastrophe during the height of the pandemic.