Feds Wasted $10 Billion in Bogus Food Stamp Payments Last Year; How the Federal Government Loses More Money Than Its Bean-Counters Can Count

Feds wasted $10 billion in bogus food stamp payments last year:

The government handed out more than $10 billion in overpayments from the food stamp program last year, according to an audit Friday that shows the end of the pandemic has done little to bring down high fraud rates.

The Agriculture Department, which runs the program, said more than 10% of all payouts were overpayments. Another 1.6% were underpayments, for a total error rate of nearly 12%.

Given the program’s size, the overpayments work out to $10 billion, congressional Republicans said.

“The level of erroneous payments remains shockingly high,” said House Agriculture Committee Chairman Glen Thompson, Pennsylvania Republican, and Sen. John Boozman, the top Republican on the Senate agriculture committee. “We are far removed from the pandemic, and it should no longer be used as a crutch.”

The Biden administration said overpayments aren’t necessarily fraud, though some of that is included in the rate.

Food stamps, officially known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, are administered by the states but funded by the federal government.

And there was a massive range of performances at the state level in fiscal 2023. —>READ MORE HERE

How the Federal Government Loses More Money Than Its Bean-Counters Can Count:

Not long after Jeremy Gober started running a sleep center, he quit treating patients for narcolepsy and sleep apnea and went full-time submitting bogus insurance claims. According to Gober’s 2022 indictment, he committed at least one especially sloppy error: One of his make-believe billings included a Medicare claim for treatment in March 2018 for a patient who’d died in December 2017. Before Gober was caught, Medicare and California’s healthcare system, Medi-Cal, ended up paying him a total of $587,000 for claims that turned out to be fiction.

The payments to Gober were part of $260 million the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services spent from 2009 through 2019 to reimburse healthcare providers in 15 states and Puerto Rico for services to patients who were dead, according to the inspector general of the HHS, which administers Medicare and Medicaid — programs with combined expenditures of $1.7 trillion.

The government classifies money like the sums that went to Gober as “improper payments.” The estimated total for all executive-branch agencies is startling: In the 2023 fiscal year, which ended September 30, improper payments amounted to $236 billion. The Government Accountability Office, which compiles the figures from agency estimates, notes that the number would be much higher if it got a full accounting from all the departments required to report them, which it doesn’t. Still, it’s the only estimate we have, and out of that number, nearly three-quarters, or $175 billion, were overpayments that included fraud. The rest were a mix of underpayments ($11.5 billion), payments that were made outside program rules ($4.6 billion), or what the agencies identified as unknown payments ($44.6 billion), meaning they couldn’t be sure whether there was an error or not.

Since 2003, cumulative estimates of improper payments by executive-branch agencies, which GAO reports show are on the low side just like the 2023 numbers, have reached $2.7 trillion. That’s equivalent to roughly 10% of everything produced in the U.S. this year.

The fiscal 2023 numbers were down 16% from fiscal 2021, when pandemic-related relief such as the Small Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program boosted improper payments to a peak of $281 billion. Fiscal 2023, however, still tops pre-COVID-19 amounts, the GAO said, and executive-branch watchdogs warn that they expect the numbers to increase with new spending related to programs like the Inflation Reduction Act, the Infrastructure Act, and the CHIPS Act.

“As programs get bigger, the likelihood of improper payments gets bigger, too,” said Hannah Padilla, the director in charge of the latest comprehensive GAO report. “That’s just math.”

In fiscal 2023, the government was able to recoup only about $26 billion, or 11% of the wayward taxpayer funds. Such a leaky bureaucracy indicates waste, at best, and at worst, unpunished crimes. Inspectors general at Cabinet-level agencies say they need more resources to prevent improper payments rather than chase the money after it goes out the door. They say their budgets right now are too tight to allow them to pursue tips that could lead to fraud convictions, nor is it possible for them to even estimate how much is actually being robbed from government programs that suffer from the shortfalls created by misdirected money.

“Every dollar lost to an improper payment is a dollar not spent on lifesaving care, innovative treatment, or essential services for our citizens,” said Republican Rep. Morgan Griffith of Virginia, who hosted an April subcommittee hearing on improper payments at HHS. “Financial mismanagement cannot be tolerated.”

Raw numbers are collected by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget and are available for download by the public at paymentrecovery.gov.

Even without the coming gusher of new spending, federal watchdogs are complaining to Congress about the obstacles they encounter keeping track of taxpayer funds. The hurdles they enumerate include: —>READ MORE HERE

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