By Chuck Gallagher — Business Ethics Keynote Speaker and Trainer
TL;DR: A June 2026 grand jury indictment of two former Georgia temp workers for stealing $36,000 in COVID rental assistance funds is not news about greed — it is news about human beings making decisions under pressure that overwhelmed their capacity for ethical reasoning. Chuck Gallagher, business ethics keynote speaker, argues that COVID-era fraud was not primarily driven by bad people; it was driven by triggered people. When financial challenges, relationship challenges, and health challenges converge simultaneously, human beings become neurologically less capable of making logical, ethical choices — and the pandemic was the only event in modern American history to fire all three triggers at once, across the entire population. The prosecutions appearing now are the delayed reckoning of choices made in that storm.
The Emergency Rental Assistance Program was built for speed. Jobs had vanished overnight. Evictions were coming. Families were making impossible choices. The federal government, acting under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, pushed billions through state agencies operating in crisis mode, often with reduced staff and temp workers filling the gaps. Jasmin Grant, 44, of Jonesboro, and Theresa Davis, 56, of East Point, were two of those temp workers — placed at the Georgia Department of Community Affairs and given access to a system processing real money tied to real people’s identities. According to a Fulton County grand jury indictment filed June 4, 2026, they used that access to file fraudulent rental assistance claims using stolen identities, then directed the funds into their own bank accounts. Grant faces three counts of false statements and writings and three counts of identity fraud. Davis faces one count of identity fraud. Together, they allegedly collected more than $36,000. Earlier this year, Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr secured the indictment of six other individuals — including former DCA employee Porsha Robinson — for a separate scheme targeting the same program and totaling nearly $230,000.
Why Do Human Beings Make Unethical Choices Under Pressure?
As a business ethics keynote speaker, I want to offer a framework here that goes beyond the standard explanations you will read in most fraud analyses. We talk a great deal about greed in these cases. We talk about intent, about criminal character, about bad actors. What we talk about far less is the neuroscience of stress and its relationship to ethical decision-making. When human beings are under serious pressure — real, sustained pressure — their decision-making shifts. The prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for logical reasoning, long-term consequence assessment, and ethical judgment, becomes less dominant. Stress hormones flood the system. Decisions get made faster, with less deliberation, and with a much shorter time horizon. People in genuine crisis do not think the way people in stable circumstances think. That is not an excuse. But it is a fact, and it matters enormously for understanding what happened during COVID.
I have identified three primary triggers that, when activated, make unethical choices significantly more likely. The first is financial challenge — not merely inconvenience, but genuine economic threat. U.S. unemployment hit 14.7 percent in April 2020, the highest since the Great Depression. Millions of people lost income overnight. Evictions, bill collectors, empty refrigerators. Financial stress is the most researched trigger in ethics literature, and it is consistently correlated with increased willingness to bend rules. The second trigger is relationship challenge. Isolation, divorce, estrangement, the collapse of workplace community — COVID delivered all of it simultaneously. When people are cut off from the relationships that ground them, they lose the social accountability that normally functions as an ethical check. If no one who knows you can see what you are doing, it becomes easier to do things you would not otherwise do. The third trigger is health challenge — not just illness itself, but the anxiety, fear, and helplessness that accompany a health crisis at scale. Fear is a particularly powerful disruptor of frontal-cortex reasoning. People in genuine fear of their own mortality, or the mortality of people they love, do not make the same decisions they make on an ordinary Tuesday.
COVID was the only event in my professional lifetime that activated all three of those triggers simultaneously, across the entire population, sustained over years. That is the perfect storm. Not because the pandemic created dishonest people — it did not. Most people who were financially devastated, relationally isolated, and genuinely frightened during COVID did not commit fraud. But the conditions made the ethical floor far harder to stand on. And a meaningful percentage of people — enough to generate an estimated $10 billion in attempted COVID-related fraud according to the IRS — made choices in that storm that they are now facing consequences for, years later.
Why Are the Prosecutions Still Coming Years After the Pandemic?
This is the part that surprises people. The pandemic relief programs closed years ago. The national emergency has been lifted. And yet the Grant-Davis indictment was filed in June 2026. Georgia’s attorney general has now indicted eight people in two separate cases targeting the same DCA program. The Department of Justice, the IRS, and state attorneys general across the country are still prosecuting pandemic-era fraud at a steady pace. The IRS reports a 97.4 percent conviction rate in COVID fraud cases it has prosecuted, and agents have opened more than 2,039 tax fraud and money-laundering investigations tied to COVID relief programs as of 2025. The cases are not drying up. If anything, they are becoming more systematic as investigators work backward through the paper trails.
This is what I tell organizations that think pandemic fraud is a closed chapter: it is not. Just because a person was triggered does not mean they did something wrong. But if they did, the consequences do not disappear when the trigger does. The stress that lowered someone’s ethical threshold in 2021 is gone. The decision made under that stress is not. Every choice has a consequence, and the consequence does not care about the circumstances under which the choice was made. As a business ethics keynote speaker, I have argued at ChuckGallagher.com for decades that the reckoning always comes. It comes on a delay sometimes — but it comes. The Grant-Davis indictment, filed six years after the CARES Act was signed, is exactly that reckoning arriving on schedule.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who are Jasmin Grant and Theresa Davis and what did they allegedly do?
Jasmin Grant, 44, of Jonesboro, and Theresa Davis, 56, of East Point, are former temp workers assigned to the Georgia Department of Community Affairs. A Fulton County grand jury indicted them on June 4, 2026, on charges of identity fraud and false statements in connection with an alleged scheme to steal more than $36,000 from Georgia’s federally funded Emergency Rental Assistance Program. The women allegedly used stolen identities to file fraudulent rental assistance claims and redirected the payments to their own bank accounts. Both are presumed innocent unless convicted at trial.
What are the three triggers that make unethical behavior more likely?
Financial challenge, relationship challenge, and health challenge are the three primary triggers that, when activated, reduce a person’s capacity for logical, ethical decision-making. Under sustained pressure in any of these areas, human beings are less likely to engage the prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain responsible for reasoning, consequence assessment, and ethical judgment — and more likely to make reactive, short-horizon decisions. COVID was historically significant because it activated all three triggers simultaneously and sustained them across the entire population for years.
How widespread was COVID relief fraud across the United States?
According to the IRS, federal agents had launched 2,039 tax fraud and money-laundering investigations tied to COVID-19 relief programs as of 2025, covering an estimated $10 billion in attempted fraud. The agency reports a 97.4 percent conviction rate in cases it has prosecuted, with many investigations still ongoing. Cases span every major relief program — including PPP loans, pandemic unemployment assistance, rental assistance, and healthcare billing — across all fifty states. In Georgia alone, Attorney General Chris Carr has now secured two separate indictment rounds targeting the same DCA rental assistance program, representing eight defendants and more than $266,000 in alleged fraud.
Does being triggered by financial, relational, or health stress excuse fraud?
No. Chuck Gallagher, business ethics keynote speaker, is clear on this point: understanding why triggered human beings are more likely to make unethical choices is not the same as excusing those choices. The framework explains the mechanism — it does not remove accountability. Every choice has a consequence, and that consequence does not disappear when the triggering circumstance does. The prosecutions appearing years after the pandemic are proof that the reckoning arrives on its own timeline, regardless of the conditions under which the original decision was made.
Why are COVID fraud prosecutions still happening years after the pandemic?
Pandemic relief fraud investigations take time because prosecutors must trace money across multiple accounts, agencies, and co-conspirators before building a prosecutable case. The IRS and Department of Justice have pursued COVID fraud systematically since 2020, and the case volume has not diminished significantly. Georgia’s June 2026 indictment of Jasmin Grant and Theresa Davis covers conduct tied to a program that stopped accepting applications in May 2023 — a reminder that the legal consequences of choices made under pressure operate on a much longer timeline than the circumstances that prompted those choices.
Share Your Thoughts
When you think about the three triggers — financial pressure, relationship disruption, health anxiety — do you see those conditions present in your organization or community today, even without a pandemic? I want to hear your perspective. Leave a comment below and I will respond personally. The five questions below are a starting point for that conversation.
Five Questions for Further Thought and Consideration
1. If financial challenge, relationship challenge, and health challenge are the three primary triggers that make unethical choices more likely, what organizational practices could realistically reduce the impact of those triggers on employees before a crisis arrives?
2. Most people who were triggered during COVID did not commit fraud. What distinguishes those who acted unethically from those who did not — and is the difference primarily about character, circumstance, or the presence of a specific opportunity?
3. The prosecutions from COVID-era fraud are still arriving years after the pandemic ended. What does the delayed nature of ethical consequences tell us about how organizations should think about accountability — not just at the moment of a decision, but over the full arc of time?
4. COVID activated all three triggers simultaneously at a population level. Are there other large-scale disruptions — economic recession, widespread layoffs, major organizational restructuring — that could produce a similar convergence of triggers, and how should leaders prepare for that possibility?
5. Just because a person is triggered does not mean they will make an unethical choice. What specific conditions — relationships, accountability structures, ethical training — most reliably help people make better decisions when their frontal cortex is under stress?
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