Bipartisan leadership of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee’s Subcommittee on Government Operations and the Federal Workforce is asking the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to take a fresh look at the Federal government’s improper payments rates and root causes at the agency level that lead to incorrect payments.
The request to GAO – whose primary mission includes providing Congress with input on how to make the government run more efficiently – came in an Oct. 29 letter from subcommittee Chairman Pete Sessions, R-Texas, and ranking member Kweisi Mfume, D-Md.
The subcommittee leaders said their request to GAO follows recent hearings on “improper payments and fraud” in the Federal government, and the panel’s aim to “continuously evaluate whether agencies are getting better or worse at ensuring the levels of fraud seen during the pandemic will ‘never happen again.’”
“We need to find and implement new solutions to prevent improper payments and fraud across government programs,” they said.
“Unfortunately, because of limited or unreliable information maintained by federal agencies, the Subcommittee has been unable to adequately assess agencies’ progress,” Reps. Sessions and Mfume said.
GAO has long tracked the government’s improper payment rate – which does not correlate on a top-line basis with payments determined to be fraudulent.
In a report issued in June, the watchdog agency defined improper payments as “ones that shouldn’t have been made, were made in an incorrect amount, or lacked sufficient supporting documentation.”
The June report found that Federal agencies reported an estimated $235.8 billion in improper payments across 71 programs for fiscal year (FY) 2023. Of that total, overpayments accounted for $175.1 billion, followed by unknown payments at $44.6 billion, underpayments at $11.5 billion, and technically improper payments at $4.6 billion.
GAO in recent years has suggested steps Congress could take to tackle the improper payment problem, including a March 2022 recommendation to designate all new Federal programs making more than $100 million in payments in any one fiscal year as susceptible to improper payments and establishing a permanent data analytics center of excellence to aid the oversight community in identifying improper payments and fraud.
“Witness testimonies at prior hearings made clear that continuing to do the same things to address improper payments is not fully addressing a long-term problem,” the two lawmakers said in their Oct. 29 letter.
“Federal law requires [high priority] programs report information such as the root causes of their improper payments, mitigation strategies, and corrective action measures. However, the amount of improper payments within these programs continues to grow,” Reps. Sessions and Mfume wrote.
The lawmakers want to hear more from GAO on an ongoing basis about whether Federal agencies running programs designated by the Office of Management and Budget as “high priority” have adequately identified and assessed the “true root causes” of improper payments “including those related to fraudulent activity.”
They also want GAO to report back on corrective actions implemented to address those root causes and data required for that effort, as well as identifying existing barriers to addressing root causes and the ability to access necessary data.
“We ask that GAO regularly update Subcommittee staff on the progress of this review and provide periodic briefings on known practices that have helped prevent improper payments and fraud,” the lawmakers said.
