COVID-19 and the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance Program in Puerto Rico: Anti-Corruption,Fraud Prevention,and Punishment

Abstract

The US and Puerto Rican governments’ anti-corruption and anti-fraud legislation and policies exacerbated the socio-economic impacts of the coronavirus disease (COVID)-19 pandemic in Puerto Rico (PR). This article demonstrates how anti-corruption interventions prevented those in most need from receiving the economic benefits of the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program and other unemployment insurance benefits. Analyzing this specific instance of anti-corruption and anti-fraud interventions amid the COVID-19 pandemic allows for a deeper examination of how colonial interventions undermined PR’s capacity to handle the pandemic, exacerbated its socio-economic impact and created an unequal recovery. Thus, the article illustrates the contradictions of anti-corruption as punitive governance and the way in which a specific notion of corruption is reproduced through governmental actions, legal practices, and policies. Altogether, this article aims to contribute to the discussion on how colonial and punitive anti-corruption interventions enhance social exclusion, disproportionately harm racialized communities, and undermine people’s capacity to address period of crisis.

Keywords

sociology of corruption anti-corruption legislation fraud colonialism punitive governance crimes of the powerful

Introduction

In recent years, Puerto Rico (PR) has been portrayed in the media and US official statements as one of the most corrupt jurisdictions in the United States. These perceptions of generalized corruption have enabled a sociolegal, political, and public policy scenario in which US colonial interventions in PR and the territory’s limited form of self-rule are constructed as essential and indispensable for preventing malfeasance, fraud, and wasteful management of public resources. These anti-corruption interventions became particularly salient in 2006 when the Puerto Rican economic and financial crisis began. From 2006 onward, the archipelago has endured a series of anti-corruption interventions that have systemically undermined the capacity of Puerto Rican governmental institutions to address emergencies and disasters, particularly the economic and financial crisis, Hurricane María in 2017, a series of earthquakes in 2020, and Hurricane Fiona in 2022.

In the context of the coronavirus disease (COVID)-19 pandemic and stay-at-home mandates, the Donald J. Trump administration enacted a series of policies intended to address the economic contraction resulting from the public health crisis. Some examples of assistance policies include programs for small businesses¹ such as the Paycheck Protection Program;² support packages to bail out airline companies, auto-manufacturers, and the oil industry through ‘the Assistance for American Industry’ program;³ assistance for state, local, and tribal governments;⁴ and assistance for American families and workers.⁵ In addition, unemployment insurance was increased, granting additional funds to those who lost their livelihoods due to the pandemic. Various programs were established by the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act,⁶ which expanded the states’ ability to provide unemployment insurance to many workers affected by COVID-19, including people who are not ordinarily eligible for unemployment benefits.⁷

The Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program, created by the CARES Act, provided direct assistance to workers by temporarily expanding the Unemployment Insurance Program (UI) eligibility to self-employed workers, freelancers, independent contractors, and part-time workers impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. PUA provided a minimum of US$66 to a maximum of US$190 per week⁸ for a period of 39 weeks for workers who are not eligible for traditional unemployment insurance. PUA beneficiaries could receive the Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation equivalent to US$600 per week, between 4 April 2020, and 30 July 2020.⁹ All these federal programs were distributed through states’ unemployment insurance programs, which in PR was carried out by the Department of Labor and Human Resources (henceforth DLHR).

As part of these programs, states were required by the US federal government to put in place legal measures that would prevent fraud and malfeasance. On 1 March 2022, President Joseph R. Biden set in motion a series of initiatives to address COVID-19-related fraud,¹⁰ including the establishment of an interagency COVID-19 Fraud Enforcement Task Force and the design and implementation of an oversight website in which all information concerning COVID-19 relief spending can be found.¹¹ Currently, these websites contain limited information on PR, fraud-related prosecutions, and the impact that anti-fraud policies had in the management of the COVID-19 emergency in PR. Despite the lack of information, one can identify a significant transformation in the way that anti-corruption interventions have operated in PR. While previous anti-corruption and anti-fraud interventions were targeted at the state and local institutions and often were conducted in the aftermath of cases of corruption, during the COVID-19 pandemic, anti-fraud policies were deployed preemptively and targeted mainly poor and working-class individuals. Thus, under the guise of fraud and corruption, the US and PR governments implemented regressive, necropolitical,¹² and punitive anti-corruption and anti-fraud measures that made it more difficult for those most in need of PUA and other economic assistance programs—mainly poor and racialized individuals, as well as immigrants and working women—to access these programs. The key rationale was to prevent corruption and fraud by limiting access to economic assistance programs or imposing burdensome administrative hurdles that would discourage individuals from seeking governmental assistance.

I argue that anti-corruption interventions that disproportionately focus on petty corruption in the management, allocation, and use of economic resources are embedded in a colonial history of US interventions in PR. In the context of colonial anti-corruption, colonized and racialized subjects are defined as uniquely capable of corruption.¹³ Thus, anti-corruption and anti-fraud interventions, based on colonial and racialized understandings, systemically undermined people’s access to economic resources and harmed the most vulnerable communities in the Puerto Rican society. I engage with the concept of punitive governance, previously developed by LeBrón (2019), to underscore the necropolitical operating logic of these anti-corruption interventions and to show how these interventions undermined people’s capacity to handle the pandemic, exacerbating the pandemic’s socio-economic impact, and contributed to the ongoing unequal recovery scenario generated by the multilayered crisis affecting PR since 2006.

The article explores the violent effects of anti-corruption and anti-fraud interventions in three sections. First, it discusses the intertwined relationship between colonialism, corruption, and the COVID-19 pandemic. It then provides a theoretical framework for the study of anti-fraud and anti-corruption interventions as a manifestation of punitive governance in the Puerto Rican colonial context. The second section provides a brief overview of PR’s recent history and its experiences with a multilayered economic, political, and humanitarian crisis since 2006. The third section focuses on the anti-fraud and anti-corruption interventions implemented by the US and PR governments and demonstrates how these policies limited access to PUA.¹⁴ There is limited scholarship on the PUA and other unemployment assistance programs implemented by the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic.¹⁵ Thus, by studying the limitations and its socio-economic impact, my aim is to contribute to the discussion of how colonial and punitive anti-corruption interventions enhance social exclusion, disproportionally harm racialized communities, and undermine people’s capacity to address periods of crisis. To be sure, in colonial and Global South context, punitive anti-corruption interventions are inextricably tied to race, class, gender, and colonial relations of power.

Colonialism, COVID-19, and Punitive Governance: Toward a Critical Engagement with Anti-Corruption Interventions

The few studies that look at the relationship between corruption, fraud, and the COVID-19 pandemic mainly emphasize the role of individuals,¹⁶ overshadowing the role of organizational and state crime, and grand corruption.¹⁷ Similarly, these studies on individual cases of corruption overlook colonial and racialized dynamic at play in the emergency management policies, as well as disregard the harmful and violent impact that laws and policies implemented to contravene corruption have on poor communities of color. In what follows, I first provide a general overview of scholarship on anti-corruption, fraud, and COVID-19. I then introduce the intertwined relationship between colonialism, punitive governance, and anti-corruption interventions in PR.

Governmental responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have generated numerous legal, constitutional, political, and economic debates (Heimer and Davis, 2022; Meierhenrich, 2021). These public debates have been dominated by discussion on the role of emergency powers, executive orders, and the suspension of economic rules to guarantee the survival of the economy.¹⁸ In each stage of the COVID-19 pandemic and response by national and international governmental bodies—from emergency economic relief to the production of personal protective equipment (PPE) to the distribution of the vaccine—new forms of rulemaking and regulation have played a central role. Indeed, it is not controversial to assert that the neoliberal management¹⁹ of the COVID-19 pandemic by Global North and South countries has been heavily based on the uses of emergency powers, executive orders, and exceptional military and policing powers (Agamben, 2021; Appadurai, 2020; Whyte, 2022). This is by no means a new phenomenon. The use of executive orders and invocations of states of emergency for the management of emergency situations is a core characteristic of the neoliberal state (Agamben, 2005; Reynolds, 2017).

This is particularly clear in the management of the pandemic in PR. On 15 March 2020, Governor Wanda Vazquez established a lockdown for 14 days and a curfew from 9 p.m. to 5 a.m.²⁰ Executive order OE-2020-29 of 30 March 2020, expanded the lockdown for another 14 days, modified the curfew from 7 p.m. to 5 a.m., and imposed additional limitations to ‘outdoors activities’, including limiting the circulation of cars on designated days based on their license plate. The curfew was amended in several instances until May 2021, when both curfew and lockdown were finally repealed.²¹ As a result, PR lived under a curfew and some forms of lockdown for a period of 14 months. It was precisely in this context of lockdowns and curfews that workplaces closed, generating and rapidly increasing unemployment and food insecurity among poor, working-class, and racialized communities. PUA and the unemployment insurance were the emergency solution to address the humanitarian crisis unfolded by the pandemic.

Despite teaching us that the most significant sites of infection and spread were workplaces, the pandemic also taught us that those spaces would not be closed (Ken and León, 2021, 2022; Whyte, 2022). In many jurisdictions, including PR, the highest rates of infection were found in ‘essential workers’ or front-line workers such as cleaning and domestic workers, agricultural workers and warehouse and delivery workers that sustained the door-to-door distribution of goods. Jobs that placed people at most risk were more likely to be casualized, non-unionized, or low paid jobs, or jobs occupied by undocumented immigrants (Dubal, 2022; Lust, 2021). Thus, exposure to COVID-19 in the workplace was highly racialized since many of the most ‘at risk’ jobs are done by minoritized workers.

Not only are minoritized workers overrepresented in front-line and high-risk occupations, but, they have been overrepresented in the denial of access to unemployment assistance, as well as in the cases of corruption and fraud to these emergency programs. Of course, the racialized management of COVID-19 cannot be entirely reduced to PUA and work. There is evidence of a complex concatenation of different forms of institutional racism that converged to expose racialized people to a much higher risk of COVID-19 exposure. The everyday racisms that shape differentiated access to emergency healthcare, housing, access to infrastructural services, and other health variables that determine differentiated mortality rate combined with a deadly force during the pandemic. The lack of adequate protection for these racialized sectors included the lack of access to unemployment protections and access to health care as well (Knox and Whyte, 2023).

One of the racialized barriers to accessing PUA was anti-corruption and anti-fraud policies. Fraud prevention and anti-corruption policies have become embedded in emergency management and disaster recovery efforts, however, the case of the distribution of PUA in PR illustrate a new dimension of these practices. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the US and PR government put in place extensive requirements and administrative burdens that prevented people—mainly poor and racialized individuals that took risky jobs that exposed them to infections and death—from accessing these unemployment funds. This anti-corruption approach based on prevention, exclusion, and systemic punishment has its roots in racialized and colonial conceptualizations of corruption, and on the necropolitical management of the pandemic (Darian-Smith, 2021; Knox and Whyte 2023). In the next section, I demonstrate the colonial and racialized rationality structuring anti-corruption intervention in PR and in the Global South.

COVID-19 Pandemic, Anti-Corruption, and Fraud

Mainstream engagement with corruption departs from neoclassical rational choice and legalistic conceptualizations that narrowly define corruption as the abuse of entrusted power for private gain (Rose-Ackerman, 1999). This definition equates corruption to bribery, and largely focuses on agent-based or individualistic acts of misappropriation (De Sa e Silva, 2020). According to De Sa e Silva (2022), corrupt individuals are seen as agents tasked with acting for the public good but who also engaged in rent seeking activities. This definition of corruption disregards the structural dynamic, historical process, and organizational instances that enable corruption (Wilson, 2023).

Similarly, Osrecki (2017) has shown that sociological engagement with corruption has been largely defined by functionalist approaches and developmental theories. Sociological studies of corruption have been largely filled by economic and quantitative approaches, which emphasized numerically comparing, correlating, and ranking corruption. This has resulted in an ‘anti-corruption discourse that builds its legitimacy not on creative ways of dealing with the social world, but on measuring the obvious’ (Osrecki, 2017: 122). In addition, Zaloznaya (2013, 2017) has shown that the lack of sociological studies of corruption has generated understandings of this phenomenon that inaccurately describe the reasons and consequences of corruption. Thus, the impact and consequences of anti-corruption interventions and policies remain somewhat unaddressed by the sociological scholarship.²²

Furthermore, the narrow definition of corruption has produced restrictive anti-corruption policies, based on policy prescriptions developed by nongovernmental organization (NGOs), policy experts, legal scholars, and international organizations (Sampson, 2010). As a result, fighting corruption has become equated with development, modernization, and democratic governance and privatization of public goods (Whyte, 2007). Thus, the most common anti-corruption policies recommended by international organizations include asset and interest declarations; beneficial ownership; transparency in political financing; whistleblowing; transparency in lobbying; and open contracting. The key factor in the development of these policies and legal measures has been transnational organizations such as the United Nations, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. Similarly, transnational NGOs like Transparency International have contributed to popularizing, quantifying, and indexing particular definitions of corruption, as well as promoted particular anti-corruption policies and legal reforms among Global South countries ranked as corrupt.

Several scholars have questioned these popular conceptualizations of anti-corruption by pointing out their neoliberal and colonial origins, as well as the methodological and epistemic flaws of these definitions and policies (Brown and Cloke, 2006; Rothe, 2010; Whyte, 2007). For example, neoliberal understandings of anti-corruption interventions are morally charged and constructed as positive policy, which disregard the social harm caused by these interventions. As Rothe (2010) has pointed out, international financial institutions, in their fight against corruption, have not only imposed Eurocentric and Global North understandings of corruption, but also enabled corruption and human right violation across the Global South. Similarly, Whyte (2007) argues that various forms of corruption are used to maintain the strategically dominant position of a particular elite group. Corruption in those contexts can be understood as a form of power-mongering: a means of maintaining economic and political dominance. In this sense, Whyte’s (2007) understanding of corruption emphasizes grand corruption and opposes individualistic (petty corruption) and reductionist conceptualizations of corruption.

Furthermore, Doshi and Ranganathan (2019) suggest that corruption is a capacious and slippery language put to a variety of opportunistic uses. It is precisely under this rubric of the malleable nature of corruption that Doshi and Ranganathan (2019) pose a working definition of corruption as a ‘normative discourse about the abuse of entrusted power and resulting social decay that are always implicitly positioned relative to a perceived normal or previously “uncorrupted” state of affairs’ (p. 448). The authors argue that ‘corruption should be understood first and foremost as a shifting discourse that is yoked to symbolic, material, and territorial power relations and contestations in late capitalism’ (Doshi and Ranganathan 2019: 437). Following this description of corruption as shifting and situated discourse, I show how anti-corruption interventions in PR reproduced punitive understandings of corruption that are inextricably tied to race, class, gender, and colonial relations of power.

Colonialism, Anti-Corruption Interventions, and Punitive Governance

Colonization is always a racialized and gendered process whose shape is influenced by hierarchies and social structures drawn from both the metropole and the existing colonized territory. Corruption discourses, and descriptions of colonial territories and subjects as corrupt, are a constitutive part of Western colonialism (Apata, 2019; Pertiwi and Ainsworth, 2021; Villanueva, 2019). This critical understanding is echoed by Wilson’s (2023) socio-historical analysis of the uses of corruption during the colonial era in India, and by Lee’s (2015) sociolegal analysis of the role of corruption in the colonial governance in the Straits Settlements. Similarly, Haller and Shore (2005) point out that ideas of corruption and economic backwardness have consistently featured in imperialist and racialized historical narratives that invoke the primitiveness of less-developed states to justify colonial interventions. Thus, corruption narratives were, and continue to be, key technology for justifying colonialism of non-western societies.

In this colonial narrative of the corrupt other, western rule of law and ‘democratization’ are bestowed as anti-corruption technologies for the colonies. Colonial and postcolonial countries are often described as disorganized, lacking the legal institutions needed to maintain order, and unable to prevent corruption. In colonial anti-corruption narratives, lacking bureaucratic liberal institutions, rule of law, a market economy, and a strong private sector are almost always equated with corruption. Mattei and Nader (2008) argue that the imposition of western ‘rule of law’ in colonial contexts is viewed as the best alternative to counteract corruption, promote transparency and political stability. Anti-corruption technology has played an essential role in legitimizing and normalizing the corruption of the powerful (Whyte, 2007), thus creating a legal framework permitting plundering, wealth extraction, and dispossession of colonial subjects. Thus, the rule of law, while criminalizing and imposing strong sanctions on individual forms of corruption, also legalizes and normalizes the corruption of the powerful (Green and Ward, 2004).

Colonial anti-corruption narratives were institutionalized by the history of colonization, sustained by the structural forces of capitalism, and have ultimately become part of the hegemonic global economic system. That is, the idea of corruption has been key to the historic transformation of the global capitalist framework from colonialism to the neoliberal globalization. This shows that the dialectic of corruption and anti-corruption is in constant movement, as each anti-corruption effort transforms the logic of corrupt practices, and each corrupt practice calls forth new kinds of anti-corruption measures.

It is precisely in this context that this article explores the impact of punitive anti-corruption and anti-fraud policies imposed by the US and PR governments. As the case of PR illustrates, several colonial anti-corruption policies imposed in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic reproduced punitive logics. LeBrón (2019) states that ‘punitive governance functions as a form of crisis management that masks an inability or unwillingness to radically transform social relations and institutions in order to address pressing societal problems’ (p. 6). According to LeBrón (2019: 3), punitive governance also refers to the ideological work undertaken by the state to promote an understanding that punishment, justice, and safety are intrinsically linked. Punitive governance has left an indelible mark on how life and death are understood and experienced in PR and has done so in a way that reinforces societal inequalities along the lines of race, class, spatial location, gender, sexuality, and citizenship status.

Punitive governance enables a specific colonial-neoliberal form of crisis management, while allowing local and colonial elites to secure their domination and reproduce their power during times of crisis. Punitive governance goes hand in hand with Gilmore’s (2007) binomial description of state power in neoliberal times as organized abandonment and organized violence. Organized abandonment is the direct consequence of the neoliberal policies and austerity measures implemented to address periods of economic crisis. That is, at the same time that the state imposes structural adjustments and engages in systemic cutbacks of welfare programs²³ undermining the already precarious living conditions of the most vulnerable sectors of society (organized abandonment); the state criminalizes and enforces stricter security measures, anti-corruption reforms, and violent policing practices against the poor and racialized populations (organized violence). These tendencies or transformations of the welfare state into a police and carceral state and the generalization of organized violence against poor communities is what critical scholars have named neoliberal punishment.²⁴ Thus, punishment and abandonment have become the public policy of the neoliberal state in the Global South (Iturralde, 2019).

Punitive governance in PR is rooted in two important phenomena: colonial abandonment and neoliberal colonial legalities. Colonial abandonment manifests through the rapid transformation of the Puerto Rican political economy, and the way the PR and the US governments see their role in the Puerto Rican society. It entails the reduction of administrative and regulatory structures, the privatization of public services, the implementation of austerity measures, the financialization of the colonial economy, and the exponential rise of the public debt. Neoliberal colonial legality manifests through the ever-increasing accumulation of power by the local executive branch and the corresponding weakening of constitutional and civil rights (normalizing the state of emergency). It not only manifests through the normalization of authoritarian policing, state violence, antidemocratic legislations, and impunity for white-collar criminals and state-corporate crimes but also actively facilitated these phenomena. Neoliberal colonial legalities create the legal framework for wealth extraction and plunder, as well as repressive social controls targeting working and poor people.

The US and PR government’s management of the pandemic and anti-corruption interventions constitutes a particular exemplary case of punitive governance. As LeBrón (2019) points out, ‘punitive governance functions through an unequal distribution of resources and life chances that affects those populations occupying some of the most tenuous positions in Puerto Rican society’ (p. 3). Indeed, these dynamics are clearly portrayed in the distribution of PUA during the COVID-19 pandemic.

A Sociolegal Overview of PR Multilayered Crisis

PR is a Caribbean archipelago consisting of the Isla Grande, the island municipalities of Vieques and Culebra, and a series of smaller islands. As a result of the Spanish–American War, the United States invaded PR on 25 July 1898, and after the signing of the Treaty of Paris²⁵ between Spain and the United States, PR was transferred to the United States. Later, PR became a domain of the US Congress under the Territorial Clause of the US Constitution.²⁶ In 1900, the US Congress legislated the Foraker Act,²⁷ which established a civil government in PR and granted Puerto Ricans limited representation in the local government. In 1917, the Jones Act²⁸ was passed, granting US citizenship to Puerto Ricans.

Simultaneously, between 1899 and 1922, in a series of cases known as the Insular Cases, the US Supreme Court ruled what would become the legal definition of PR and the US legal and political relationship with its territories. Concomitant with the legal and political practices of other western empires, the United States used corruption and economic backwardness of PR as justification for the legal accommodation developed in the Insular Cases. The opinions of the Court in the Insular Cases are embedded in racists and gendered description of Puerto Ricans as unable to rule themselves given their inherent corruption. This, I argue, constitutes an early manifestation of anti-corruption interventions, in which self-rule was denied by the US government based on racialized understandings that saw PR culture and society as corrupt by nature.

The Americanization of PR, which meant, among other things, the imposition of the US legal-political system, was ostensibly pursued to transition PR from its so-called backwardness to the western/American ways. Education and transfer of political knowledge typically associated with Americanization were seen as the alternative to dealing with the inherently corrupt nature of Puerto Ricans. Those processes of transformation and ‘education’ of Puerto Ricans did not end with the elimination of the Spanish legal-political system during the first decades of the 20th century (a system considered corrupt by the US government). Indeed, the United States has long experimented with various technologies of subjectivation and anti-corruption policies throughout the history of its colonial relationship with PR.

This colonial relationship being ongoing means that anti-corruption legal measures and policies are constantly being rearticulated to justify US intervention in PR. As Villanueva (2019) points out, ‘corruption discourses served to justify the US government’s denial of Puerto Ricans’ right to self-rule. As a result, the “corrupted” colonial subjects were forced to endure an intense policing regime to correct their behavior’ (p. 190). Likewise, when analyzing the legal and political development of the United States’ colonialism in PR, it can be seen how corruption has served a double function: (1) corruption has been the narrative that legitimized US colonialism in PR and (2) US capitalism has routinely pushed for instrumental anti-corruption measures and exceptional practices to ensure wealth extraction and profit-making while functionally pathologizing local leaders as untrustworthy, deviant, or otherwise ‘corrupt’.

The colonial status of PR took a new turn in 1952 with the creation of the Commonwealth of PR, which allowed Puerto Ricans to draft their own constitution. This law, however, did not imply a substantial change in the US–PR political relationship; a telling example is that almost all the areas related to trade, money, international agreements, immigration, and tariffs are still under US control.

PR has experienced economic hardship since 2006 resulting from: the US Congress’ decision, in 1996, to eliminate the tax exemption known as Section 936 of the US Internal Revenue Code (1976);²⁹ a high level of public indebtedness, and; the global economic crisis of 2008. As a result, Puerto Ricans have endured two decades of budgetary cuts, privatization and externalization of public services, low corporate taxation, and high dependence on bonds and debt issuance. These measures led to the bankruptcy of the PR government in 2016, when the public debt amounted to US$72 billion.

After the default in 2016, US Congress passed Public Law No. 114–118, known as Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA). PROMESA is the United States’ solution to PR’s crisis, and it is accompanied by the imposition of a Financial Oversight and Management Board (FOMB). Largely justified under the pretext of public corruption in the PR government, PROMESA and the FOMB have been the US government solutions for ensuring the survival of the capitalist financial system, guaranteeing the payment of the public debt, and bringing PR back into financial and stock markets.

Against this background, in September 2017 Hurricanes Irma and María, destroyed the archipelago in September 2017, leaving behind as much as US$94 billion in damages and close to 3000 deaths. Then, on 7 January 2020, a 6.4 magnitude earthquake struck the southern region of PR. The earthquake caused the displacement of 6400 residents; over 8300 damaged houses; and an estimated US$3.1 billion in damages. Finally, in September 2022, Hurricane Fiona landed in PR leaving behind a severely damaged electric grid, and millions of dollars in damages.

As a result, when the COVID-19 global pandemic arrived in March 2020, PR was in a more precarious position than any other state or territory of the United States. PR faced a US$9.7 billion direct economic impact, the loss of approximately US$2 billion in tax revenue (Wyss, 2020); the permanent loss of over 166,000 jobs,³⁰ and the loss of over 6000 lives as result of the pandemic. It is important to note, that PR has been experiencing a public health crisis since the 1990s driven by limited resources allocated for preventive health care, austerity policies, and primary care privatization (Pérez et al., 2022). As a result, public health in the archipelago is not equitable, nor is it generally responsive to the needs of the population it serves.

The PR government managed the COVID-19 pandemic through an array of emergency powers, executive orders, and state of emergency declarations (Atiles, 2021, 2022a). The continuous use of emergency measures to contain the impact of the pandemic and the lack of a well-defined policy exacerbated previously existing forms of social inequality and vulnerabilities. The overreach in the uses of emergency powers is particularly evident in how the administrations of former governors Wanda Vazquez (August 2019 to December 2020) and Pedro Pierluisi (January 2021-present) managed the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, between March 12 and December 30, former governor Vázquez issued 48 executive orders³¹ to address the COVID-19 pandemic, while governor Pierluisi issued 45 executive orders, to this same end, after taking office on 2 January 2021.

These executive orders and emergency declarations are often contradictory, unclear, and ineffective in addressing the pandemic. Furthermore, several of the issues surrounding the PUA and other economic assistance programs are directly connected to the declarations of the state of emergency, the imposition of lockdowns, curfews, and other legal measures that limited people’s capacity to work. As mentioned above, PR was under a curfew and some form of lockdown for 14 months. Importantly, many of these executive orders introduced anti-corruption and anti-fraud measures that curtailed access to emergency funds needed to address the economic crisis generated by the COVID-19 pandemic, without an adequate process of public communication (Atiles, 2022a). It is in this context of economic decline, social vulnerability, and multilayered crisis that the analysis of anti-corruption interventions becomes relevant.

PUA and Anti-Corruption Interventions in PR

The management of the COVID-19 pandemic by the PR government has been marked by two types of corruption schemes and anti-corruption interventions. First, one can identify cases of grand corruption, and second the anti-corruption interventions involving PUA, the Disaster Unemployment Assistance (DUA), and other COVID-19 emergency relief funds. Elsewhere I have documented and analyzed the cases of grand corruption, state-corporate crimes, and their impact on the management of the COVID-19 pandemic (Atiles, 2021). These corruption cases took place in the public procurement of COVID-19 test kits and PPE. Since the state of emergency was declared on 12 March 2020,³² the purchase of COVID-19 test kits, medical equipment, and PPE to address the emergency was plagued by irregularities involving members of the executive branch, the local Medical Task Force, the PR National Guard, and the private sector. Over US$45 million in public funds were spent amid the emergency under irregular circumstances (Cintrón and Valentín, 2020). Much of the spending took place under the legal framework of executive order OE-2020-24 of 16 March 2020, which deregulated the procurement and compliance processes in purchasing medical equipment to address the pandemic.

Second, the anti-corruption and anti-fraud interventions put in place by the PR and US governments to curtail fraud and corruption in the allocation of PUA and other economic assistance programs caused three general issues: (1) the development and implementation of a new platform for the application to PUA, which had embedded anti-identity theft and anti-fraud protection, failed, or malfunctioned repeatedly preventing people from applying and accessing the economic assistance programs; (2) lack of transparency on the allocation of PUA, coupled with systemic denial of this benefits for applicants, and lack of information concerning why such a denial took place; and (3) systemic deployment of punitive anti-fraud measures, which resulted in arrests of mainly racialized and impoverished individuals. Together with these arrests, since January 2022, the DLHR have started sending collection letters to those individuals that received PUA and were overpaid or wrongly found eligible for this economic assistance program. These three instances are just few examples of how punitive governance, anti-corruption interventions, and the chaotic management of the pandemic systemically harmed communities and individuals in need. In what follows, I discuss these three instances in detail and show how anti-corruption and punitive governance harmed these communities.

Profiting from Technology Failures: Corporations and Colonial Abandonment in the Application to PUA

The DLHR put in place a series of technological measure aiming at preventing identity theft and fraud. These technological measures included a website named SABEN, through which individual had to apply for unemployment insurance, the PUA, and other pandemic assistance programs. This website was not designed to manage the high volume of visits and applications, and as Collazo and De Jesús (2021) reported on 28 April 2020, on the first day that the benefits were available, the website collapsed leaving thousands of applicants unable to receive any unemployment benefits or economic assistance.³³

The government then moved to the development of a new platform named Fast Pua. Under the guise of efficiency and preventing fraud, the DLHR externalized the development of this platform, and the technological services to process applications for PUA to EVERTEC—a local corporation subsidiary of Banco Popular³⁴ (Alvarez and Sepúlveda, 2020; Sepúlveda, 2020). The DLHR amended in two instances its already existing contract with EVERTEC.³⁵ For example, the original contract to provide technological consulting services amounted to US$4,043,172.00 and was then amended to design the Fast Pua platform. The amendment that was signed on 8 June 2020, for US$1,141,188.00,³⁶ also included that EVERTEC will establish a Call Center to facilitate the application to the PUA.

The establishment of the new platform and other technological measures further limited access to PUA in several ways. For example, these measures did not take into consideration individuals who do not have physical access to computers, smartphones, or the Internet; or do not possess the knowhow to operate these devices. That is, all claims needed to be conducted online, in disregard for the digital divide and lack of access to reliable Internet and electric services in post-Hurricane María PR. This limited the access to PUA for certain populations, leaving them unable to submit their initial claims. Furthermore, family members that could have helped with the application process were discouraged to do so given anti-identity theft and anti-fraud measure embedded in the platform.³⁷

The systemic issues with the platform, and the lack of other means to access, apply, or follow up with the application to PUA meant that numerous applicants lacked access to information on the status of their applications. The technological measures limited the access to the information concerning the processing of PUA claims.³⁸ People could not know if their application had been processed, and whether they were going to receive economic assistance. As result, some applicants resorted to informal or casualized jobs to substitute to the lack of income. Oftentimes this meant that individuals risked being in violations of PUA’s anti-fraud measures, since one could consider that they were working while at the same time having stated that they were unable to work because their places of work were closed. In addition, these individuals were also putting themselves in situations in which they could be found in violation of the curfew,³⁹ or even putting their life and their family at risk of infection. These technological failures and the lack of clear information exemplified how the mismanagement of the pandemic and the punitive approaches to anti-corruption and anti-fraud manufactured the conditions for punitive governance. In absence of clear information or faced with colonial abandonment, people put themselves in risk-prone situations that enhanced their vulnerability and their likelihood to face some form of state intervention and punishment.

Similarly, the Call Center established by EVERTEC did not have the necessary personnel to respond to the substantial number of calls received daily. As a result, people spent hours on the phone waiting for someone to answer their calls (Tellado, 2020). This left numerous unemployed individuals without assistance to make their initial claim. For example, Ayuda Legal⁴⁰ (2021) noted that between June 2020 and October 2021 they helped 1448 applicants with the request for PUA and unemployment insurance, many of which were unable to receive any governmental help with their applications. Faulty technology, compounded with the digital divide and lack of personalized services, enhanced people’s vulnerability, and lack of access to services that were meant to alleviate the socio-economic impact of the pandemic.

The systemic problems on the platform, the lack of personnel at the DLHR and at the Call Centers, led to an official inquiry by the PR House of Representatives (henceforth PRHR) on 11 May 2020.⁴¹ The inquiry found a negligent implementation of the website, and lack of oversight by the DLHR and recommended that the PR Department of Justice (PRDJ) conduct further investigations. The PRHR did not publish a final report on this inquiry. However, the Commission of ‘Economic Development, Planification, Telecommunications, Public-Private Partnership and Energy’ of the PRHR made public a statement submitted by the DLHR on 3 June 2020, answering several questions on the management of the PUA and other unemployment benefits.⁴²

One of the first issues that the inquiry and the DLHR’s public statement addressed is that the platform automatically raised ‘errors’ with the application that would prevent individuals from receiving any type of assistance. The anti-fraud measures put in place was a technologically driven system that would raise ‘controversial points’.⁴³ These controversial points entailed that the applicants could not receive the economic help provided by PUA until they solve or eliminate those issues with their applications in one of the offices of the DLHR, or by calling to the Call Center. According to the statement submitted by the DLHR, they identified over 25,000 controversial points, which were later eliminated, so that the applicants could receive the PUA or the unemployment insurance. In total, Ayuda Legal (2021) found that over 50,000 controversial points were raised during the period that the PUA lasted. That is, there were some 50,000 applicants that were unable to receive any economic assistance because of such errors.⁴⁴ A key problem was that given the stay-at-home orders the DLHR offices reminded closed, and applicants to PUA where unable to address the issues with their applications.

Yet another issue identified by the PRHR inquiry is that the platform did not provide a mechanism for applicants to safely submit or upload their personal information and other related documents. Citing identity theft issue, the DLHR created a curbside in some of the regional offices so that applicant could submit their personal information in paper. This information was to be processed by hand and compared with the application made on the platform. This made the waiting period even longer and once more demonstrates that the platform and the technologies put in place to prevent fraud in effect enhanced people’s vulnerabilities and lack of effective delivery of the needed economic assistance.

Between 24 July and 25 October 2020, the PR Office of the Inspector General of PR (OIG) issue three reports on the management of the PUA by the DLHR. In the first report,⁴⁵ published on 24 July 2020, OIG noticed that DLHR’s employees accepted bribes and payments to accelerate or to facilitate the process of the PUA and unemployment applications. According to the report, the DLHR employees accepted bribes to remove the ‘controversial points’ or to grant the PUA to individuals that were not entitled to the assistance. That is, some DLHR employees took advantage of the technological issues described above, and lack of effective service to request payment for their help.

The three reports issue by the OIG reveals that corruption, fraud, and bribery were enabled by the technological inefficacy and failures embedded in the platform created by EVERTEC and by the lack of oversight. This did not only mean that employees solicited bribes, but also mean that an individual could use different social security numbers to apply for the PUA. According to the investigation, an individual with connections in the DLHR managed to receive US$126,000 in PUA.⁴⁶ Furthermore, the third report found that the DLHR may have disbursed more than US$1 million in funds from the PUA program to nine mailing addresses including residences, apartments, and post office boxes, among others.⁴⁷ Later, in September 2022, the OIG reported in its 2021–2022 Annual Report that nine public employees received payments of PUA, even when they were fully employed.⁴⁸

The case of technological failures illustrates a dual dimension of the administrative structures of the colonial state. First, it shows how colonial emergency powers are implemented to deregulate governmental procurement of services without adequate oversight or compliance. Second, it shows how colonial abandonment and bureaucratic management of the pandemic contributed to curtail the access to necessary economic resources for those who need it the most. This shows how individuals are caught in between emergency powers, anti-fraud policies, corporate harm and profiteering, and the constant thread of punishment, which render the local state unable to deliver basic services.

Who Got the PUA Anyways? Anti-Fraud, Lack of Information, and Transparency

In addition to the technologic issue, there is inadequate information about how many individuals received PUA, the unemployment insurance, and DUA. While there is information on initial claims,⁴⁹ the DLHR did not make public how many people received these benefits. According to the above-mentioned PRHR inquiry on 11 May 2020, there were 238,934 applications to the state unemployment insurance and over 90,000 applications to PUA. Similarly, according to the information gathered by the Federal Reserve Bank of Saint Louis during the height of the pandemic, on 23 May 2020, there were 67,611 initial claims;⁵⁰ nevertheless, there is no information on how many of those claims were adequately processed or even granted.

The DLHR provided limited information on these numbers, even after several attempts by the author of this paper, and after Ayuda Legal initiated a series of legal mobilizations, including a lawsuit⁵¹, requesting that the DLHR publish the information on how many people had received the benefit of PUA. The PR government and the DLHR argued that this information was not protected under the PR’s transparency jurisprudence,⁵² and its publication could threaten the privacy of the recipients of this benefit or facilitate fraud and identity theft. Finally, the DLHR shared partial information with Ayudal Legal on 3 November 2021; however, this information was shared in a format difficult to read and contained contradictory data.⁵³ Furthermore, in my personal communication with the lawyer who brought the lawsuit for Ayuda Legal, she noted that the DLHR did not have the information, but rather the corporations running the platform—EVERTEC and Fast Enterprises LLC—were the ones holding the information. Accordingly, the DLHR had to request this information to these corporations, and they were the ones that put together the data for the DLHR to share with Ayuda Legal.

The externalization of the management of the platform for the application of PUA meant that these two corporations are now in control of personal information of people seeking economic assistance. Therefore, one must wonder whether the corporate management of that information undermined the DLHR and the PR government capacity to address people’s needs amid the pandemic. The lack of access to this basic information raises important questions about whether the DLHR and the local government had a clear idea of how many people received any economic assistance. For example, the DLHR report submitted to the PRHR provided a series of numbers regarding first claims and incomplete information.

According to data published on May 28, 2020, by the United States Department of Labor, 275,478 initial claims have been made in PR from March 16, 2020, to May 23 of 2020. As of May 25, 2020, around 175,145 applicants are receiving this benefit. Regarding the PUA, until today there are about 73,388 people receiving the benefit. We have received some 107,000 applications for this program to date. In total, 248,533 people are receiving benefits right now and more than one trillion dollars in payments have been issued since April 1, 2020 (US$1.07 trillion).

As it can be noted, the DLHR is using the data provided by the US government as reference, and the limited data that they shared are too general. For example, there is no discussion of why only 73,388 out of 107,000 applicants received PUA. Similarly, there is no information on the status of the applications that are not receiving the PUA. This indicates that the DLHR lacked specific information of how many people were effectively receiving economic assistance.

In tandem with the lack of general information, it is important to note that applicants also lacked access to information on the status of their applications. Oftentimes, the information shared on the platform was unreliable or nonexistent, and many applicants complained of long waits or of being unable to get a hold of someone in the call centers. This shows how the lack of information operated at multiple levels, including: (1) general information that can be shared with governmental institutions as part of the regular process of accountability and transparency; (2) data/information that can be effectively shared with the public (including researchers and pro-transparency organizations); (3) relevant information that can be shared with applicants or people seeking economic assistance; and (4) unclear and contradictory information that undermined peoples’ access to economic assistance.

This last point is particularly clear when considering the contradictory information given to immigrant communities. For example, the DLHR put in place additional hurdles to prevent immigrant populations from accessing the PUA. Encarnanción (2020) points out that many immigrants, especially Dominican women living in PR, were left out of programs such as PUA due to their migratory status and the lack of concrete policies addressing their needs. Encarnanción (2020) reminds us that undocumented immigrants were excluded from the federal CARES Act, but several US jurisdictions with foreign-born populations took steps to fill that gap. PR was not one of them; however, the DLHR did not share this information widely. Thus, some immigrants applied for the benefits of PUA, under the understanding that in other US jurisdictions, they were entitled to this economic assistance, which, in turn, put them at risk to be arrested for fraud to these programs. Furthermore, these hurdles or denial of economic assistance further forced this community into positions of vulnerability and to take on jobs that enhanced their likelihood to COVID-19.

A further example of the convergence between lack of information, punitive approaches, and colonial abandonment can be identified in the assistance program for the payment of rent and utilities known as COVID-Renta.⁵⁴ This program was created to help underserved communities with basic rent payments, however, as Ayuda Legal noticed, the PR government and the PR Department of Housing did not inform people who might be eligible for these programs. As a result, on 30 June 2022, the PR government returned to the federal government US$85.2 million in unused funds (Ruiz, 2022). These funds could have alleviated the economic burden faced by undeserved and racialized communities, but instead the PR government decided not to distribute them (Ruiz, 2022). Moreover, while the PR government did not distribute these funds, Ayuda Legal identified that the PR did not enforce the eviction moratorium put in place by the US HUD. That is, poor and working-class communities were left to fend for themselves, despite the availability of economic and regulatory mechanisms to protect them in the context of the Pandemic.

Altogether, the lack of information, and unclear policies put in place by the PR government created the condition for misinformation, and for fraud and corruption. In many ways, the anti-corruption and anti-fraud measures manufactured the condition for individuals to find themselves in situations in which they could face some form of state violence and punishment.

The Violence of Anti-Corruption: Arrests, Collection Letters, and Punitive Governance

Finally, the way in which the local and federal administrations have been prosecuting cases of petty corruption constitutes an example of punitive governance and demonstrates the violent effect of anti-corruption. At the local level, there have been several reports of fraud to PUA; however, PRDJ and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have not provided an official account of these cases. Collazo and De Jesús (2021) point out that, in February 2021, 61 cases of fraud were under investigation, 93 cases were already charged and brought to court, and in other 368 cases, the PRDJ asked the DLHR for more information. On 26 June 2023, the PRDJ responded to my requests for the access to information,⁵⁵ and shared that Office of the Chief Prosecutor had in record—until 31 May 2023—that 40 cases have been filed in court, and that 68 cases additional cases were under investigations. However, the PRDJ did not provide additional information on the status of previous arrest and prosecutions.

Although the arrests and the prosecution of fraud cases might have been accurate, what struck many commentators was that the people charged with fraud were mainly racialized and minoritized individuals,⁵⁶ while affluent individuals received different prosecution. For example, Leandra (2021) has shown how high school students at an elite private school defrauded the PUA program, while thousands waited to receive benefits. Collazo and De Jesús (2021) found that while many of the privileged students involved in the fraud against PUA were not charged or prosecuted, PRDJ was working on several other cases of fraud against PUA. This reveals how race and class play a key role in the construction and prosecution of corruption in PR.

On 24 March 2022, local newspapers reported that the DLHR referred to the PRDJ and the FBI over 700 cases of fraud, 600 of which were from incarcerated individuals (Caro, 2022). Furthermore, petty fraud has been the leading cause of arrest; the PRDJ has not invested the same time and resources to prosecute corporations and businesses that took advantage of pandemic relief.

The PR anti-corruption and anti-fraud interventions were coupled with the US federal government’s anti-fraud policies. For example, on 1 March 2022, President Biden’s administration implemented a series of policies to target PUA and other COVID-19-related fraud.⁵⁷ These policies represented renewed efforts to punish petty corruption. According to the US Secret Service, nearly US$100 billion has been lost from COVID-19 relief programs set up to help businesses⁵⁸ and people who lost their livelihoods due to the pandemic (CBS, 2021). Based on the analysis of the press-releases issue by the US Department of Justice in PR between 21 April 2021 and 23 May 2023, 34 individuals were arrested for fraud in the PUA program by the federal authorities. According to the same press release, these 34 individuals defrauded over US$2 million in PUA. Now compare this case of fraud with US$10.3 million and 50 individuals arrested between February 2023 and May 2023 by the FBI in PR for fraud to Small Business Administration funds.

In addition to the arrests and prosecution, one of the cases that demonstrate the uses of anti-fraud and anti-corruption interventions as punitive governance is the collection letter sent to individuals who received the benefit of PUA. Particularly salient is the case of hundreds of women head of household who have received collection letters for PUA payments. According to Ayuda Legal (2021), the DLHR misled or gave wrong information about their eligibility to the PUA. Accordingly, these women, many of whom could not work because they did not have access to childcare, could have applied to unemployment insurance, instead they applied to the PUA program due to the information given by the DLHR (Rayos, 2021). Ayuda Legal (2021) found that there were approximately 23,824 cases of money collection. The organization found that the DLHR could have offered unemployment insurance to this population, instead it made them apply for PUA, and then sent them collection letters because they were ineligible to the benefits of the PUA. Furthermore, the DLHR externalized the issuing of collection letters to EVERTEC and Fast Enterprises LLC⁵⁹ and paid these companies to further develop the Fast Pua platform to include a section in which individuals who received the collection letter could pay their debt. This further exemplified how these two corporations have profited out of the management of the pandemic, and of their own technological failures.

On 4 September 2021, when PUA was finally discontinued, thousands of individuals never received the help and economic support offered by the economic assistance program. Altogether, this is an example of how punitive governance operates in PR, but is also an example of how anti-corruption and anti-fraud interventions often end up targeting minoritized populations. This illustrates how anti-fraud and anti-corruption interventions limit access to necessary governmental services to the underserved communities. Anti-corruption interventions were used to control, discipline, and punish the most vulnerable populations, rather than using these powers to prevent the contagion and guarantee the wellbeing of the population. Punitive governance transforms the state’s emphasis from providing essential services to policing the access to those services.

Conclusion

The US and PR governments’ anti-corruption interventions limited PUA access from those needing it the most and undermined PR’s capacity to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. That is, anti-corruption interventions harmed and violently limited the access of minoritized populations to basic governmental services. Anti-corruption interventions generated the opposite effect of what was intended, rather than enabling an effective and humane response to the pandemic, anti-corruption interventions and emergency powers enabled punitive approaches to the administration and distribution of emergency aid.

The case of PUA, the unemployment insurance and other economic assistance programs demonstrates that anti-corruption interventions have taken away economic and political resources that could have been implemented to target social inequalities or for regulations that target the structural dynamic causing corruption. As a result, these anti-corruption policies manufactured the conditions for corruption. This is an important contradiction that this article aimed to elucidate. The problem is not the result of a contradiction between law in books and law in action, or the need for more efficient legislation. Rather, we need to reflect on the ways in which the implementation of anti-corruption measures do not serve the purpose of reducing public corruption, but to punish, exclude, and secure the ruling class’s position amid the crisis.

Paradoxically, the management of anti-corruption and fraud cases also reproduce the practices of lack of transparency and lack of accountability that civil society organizations have been pointing out as one of the key problems in the government. Lack of transparency is observed in the lack of data and information about who benefited from PUA, fraud cases, arrests, as well as in the process to solicit the PUA. By not providing the adequate information and enabling a transparent process to apply for the emergency aid, the state created the condition for fraud and corruption. To be sure, the lack of transparency, colonial abandonment, and corruption of the powerful entities manufactured the conditions for fraud and other cases of petty corruption.

The analysis conducted on the anti-corruption interventions and their impact on underserved population can be replicated in other Global South communities or racialized communities in the United States. The epistemic and policy development of anti-corruption industry manufactured the language and narrative about Global South countries and their inherent corruption, that was then articulated by the US and PR governments in PR. Similarly, by centering the experiences of those who faced the violent effects of anti-corruption interventions, this paper aimed to underscore the impact that Eurocentric and Global North anti-corruption policies have in communities of color and Global South countries. Thus, the analysis of anti-corruption as punitive governance in PR, I argue, can shed light on similar practices in other Global South and racialized communities.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank David Whyte, Musa Hamideh, Joaquin Villanueva, the peer-reviewers, and David Fasenfest for their encouraging and insightful comments on this article and for all their help in preparing for its publication.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Jose Atiles

Notes

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