AFAICT, there's nothing stopping the government from charging recipients with fraud even after the loan is forgiven.
Sadly, this usually is the people who tried a fraud for the first time instead of those who are experts at repeated frauds. Nobody follows the letter of the law like someone violating the spirit.
I agree that they may hit a few thousands at most, and much of the "fraud" is unprovable (e.g., companies that would have survived without a PPP loan but got one anyway, etc).
Nothing except that peaky thing called political reality that tends to get in the way of every ham-fisted enforcement action that the pro-jackboot subset of any given democracy is calling for at any particular minute.
Remember back when they tried hiring more IRS agents? The left made memes about government turning the screws on the poors once again. The right made memes about shooting feds. It was very clear that few on either side of the isle supports that kind of stuff right now.
Political reality precludes making even a suggestion of doing that prior to November 9th or thereabouts. The PPP fraud is a dead bloated deer in the middle of the political road at 3pm on a Friday. And 2/2 employees of the animal control department are hoping the weekend guy can deal with it if the coyotes don't get to it first.
And frankly, I kind agree. It's water under the bridge at this point and while the fraud was predicted it did mostly get dumped into the economy as intended and there's no way to know we didn't avert a worse crisis by doing that, fraud and all.
https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/irs-advises-that-improperly-for...