An unexpected emergency relief program hastily rolled out in the early days of the pandemic experienced such weak fraud protections that it improperly doled out practically $4.5 billion to self-employed individuals who mentioned they had added workers — even all those who manufactured wildly implausible claims, like acquiring a single million employees. The $20 billion plan, called the Economic Injuries Catastrophe Personal loan Advance, provided tiny companies rapid grants of up to $10,000 in the months just after the pandemic shuttered substantially of the economic climate. But hundreds of hundreds of the grants it produced have been inflated simply because there was no process to catch applications with “flawed or…