Thompson:
Six Federal Programs Shell Out Over $19 Billions In
Erroneous Payments
Billions
More Wasted Government-wide Unidentified by Agencies
Friday,
September 6, 2002
WASHINGTON
,
DC
– Senate Governmental Affairs Committee Ranking Member Fred
Thompson (R-TN) today released a report outlining the
troubling trend that federal agencies continue to fail to
identify billions of taxpayer dollars wasted each year in
erroneous payments.
“It is disgraceful that
the federal government is failing to report financial
mismanagement of Americans’ tax dollars,” Thompson said.
“The public has a right to know when Medicare wastes
more than $12 billion a year on services that were never
provided, or pays medical bills that the government
shouldn’t be covering. For
each of the 39 million Americans enrolled in Medicare,
that’s over $300 a year.
That would make quite a dent in their monthly medical
bills.”
Of the six government
agencies that did report the extent of their erroneous
payments – the Military Retirement Trust Fund, Education
Assistance programs, Medicare, Housing Subsidy programs, the
Labor Department, and Social Security -- it is estimated that
more than $19 billion in taxpayer dollars was wasted in
erroneous payments, according to a report by the General
Accounting Office (GAO). Erroneous
payments result from a variety of causes ranging from
bureaucratic --
such as paying someone twice -- to outright fraud.
The Internal Revenue
Service continues to refund billions to fraudulent claimants
without reporting these losses, while the Department of
Agriculture’s Food Stamp Program has recently chosen not to
publicly disclose in its financial statements how many
billions of dollars it overpays to ineligible recipients and
how much it underpays to those in need.
“Wasting tens of
billions of taxpayer dollars in erroneous payments is
appalling, but even more frustrating is that fewer and fewer
agencies are disclosing these payments, so we have no way of
knowing the full extent of this mismanagement,” Senator
Thompson said. “Public
scrutiny is often the most effective tool in focusing agency
managers’ attention on certain issues, and Americans deserve
to know if their tax dollars are being mismanaged.”
The GAO report credits the
Administration’s efforts to identify and reduce erroneous
payments by tasking agencies with submitting erroneous payment
estimates to OMB and assessing quarterly executive branch
financial management activities.
“It is not just the
Administration’s responsibility to resolve erroneous payment
issues,” said Thompson.
“Congress holds the purse strings and should also be
held accountable should this problem fail to be resolved.”
General
Accounting Office (GAO) Report |