Getting it right

Stopping improper federal payments
By U.S. Sen. Susan Collins
(R-Maine)
    It is unacceptable that, in the last fiscal year, the federal government misspent a mountain of your tax dollars — an estimated $100 billion.
    The payment blunders occurred in federal programs that are particularly vulnerable to waste, fraud and abuse. In the past three years, for example, federal checks, totaling more than $180 million, were sent to about 20,000 people who were deceased. Another $230 million was sent to 14,000 convicted felons, some of whom are in jail and others who are still on the lam.
    Other specific examples from a 2008 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report show that this pattern of disgraceful errors — known as improper payments — is well entrenched in the federal bureaucracy. This is an ongoing and appalling problem. In Fiscal Year 2007, the GAO report found $12.4 billion in improper Medicaid payments, $10.8 billion in improper Medicare payments, and $4.1 billion in Supplemental Security Income.
    This represents a stunning and egregious lack of care and prudent stewardship in handling someone else’s money — yours.
    You may wonder what our nation could have done with that wasted $100 billion. Plenty. Consider that the U.S. Navy spends about $1.6 billion to build one Arleigh Burke class destroyer at Bath Iron Works. That $100 billion in wasted taxpayer money could have been used to build more than 60 of these much-needed, high-tech naval ships.
    That huge sum of money also could have gone toward helping families get back on their feet after suffering through the worst recession on record. It could have been used to retrain workers; it could have been used to help generate new jobs by lowering the tax burden on small businesses; it could have been used to fund important research and development to discover better treatments and cures for devastating diseases. It could have been used to reduce our astronomical deficit.
    Instead, $100 billion in taxpayer money has been wasted. No one could run a family budget this way. No one could run a private business this way.
    If federal agencies would scrutinize federal spending the way that American families and businesses carefully spend their budgets, then the public would have a higher degree of trust in how funds are being allocated, especially during this time of great economic uncertainty.
    Recently, we took a step toward reducing wasteful spending when the President signed a measure that I helped push through the Senate. The “Improper Payments Elimination and Recovery Act of 2010” will help ensure that the correct amount of federal money gets sent to the right recipients for the right reasons.
    In other words, it takes direct aim at waste, fraud and abuse of taxpayer dollars and puts structures in place to recover squandered money and to make sure future funds at not vulnerable to misuse.
    As Ranking Member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, I was proud to stand with my fellow sponsors of the legislation as the President signed our measure into law. It embodies recommendations stemming from recent investigations by the GAO and the Health and Human Services Inspector General.
    As a result of our legislation, the federal government now will have important new tools to target wasteful expenditures. The law requires agencies to produce audited plans to flag and reduce overpayment errors. It mandates all agencies that spend more than $1 million to perform recovery audits, which will help recoup any overpayments. Finally, it penalizes agencies that fail to reduce and recover improper payments.
    The new law also strengthens reporting requirements for programs such as Medicaid and Supplemental Security Income that have been identified as particularly vulnerable to improper payments and outright fraud. And it says that any money recovered during audits of entitlement and tax credit programs will be returned to those programs, helping ensure that program beneficiaries, such as Social Security recipients, receive their benefits.
    The government is supposed to be the wise steward of these funds, ensuring that they are spent appropriately and judiciously; that accounting standards are in place to guard against waste, fraud and abuse; and that every expenditure can be justified.
    Today, armed with a new law that targets sloppy accounting of vulnerable government programs, I am hopeful that we can right this financial ship and curb wasteful spending. With proper accounting procedures and oversight in place, we can help guarantee that the money goes where it should and for the purposes it was legitimately intended.