Austin Kocher, a professor at Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse and author of the report published Wednesday, said that fraud within the $659 billion small business aid program isn’t surprising.

“We’re looking at the data and we just saw a jump in referrals from the SBA to the U.S. Attorney’s offices, and once we looked into it, it made sense because there’s been all these issues with the PPP,” Kocher told the Las Vegas Review-Journal in an interview. “The government’s own data shows that there’s just a lot more prosecutions coming out of the CARES Act and the PPP.”

“Because we’re looking at referrals, we don’t really know how many of these prosecutions are going to go forward, or how many referrals are still out there,” said Kocher. “But, I anticipate that we would see the number of criminal prosecutions remain steady or continue to climb into 2021.”