Government: Congress Presses Forward on Improper Payments

Improving government ...

Today, the House passed the Improper Payments Elimination and Recovery Act (IPERA), legislation that will help rein in improper payments and save taxpayer dollars.

This legislation, sponsored by Congressman Patrick Murphy of Pennsylvania, would do the following:

• Put into law a monetary and percentage threshold for defining a program as susceptible to significant improper payments and make that threshold more rigorous over time.
• Reduce the monetary thresholds that define what agencies and programs must conduct payment recapture audits from $500 million to $1 million. Payment recapture audits are investigations in which specialized private sector auditors use cutting-edge technology and tools to scrutinize government payments and then find and reclaim taxpayer funds made in error or gained through fraud. These auditors can be compensated based on the amount of improper payments they identify that are then reclaimed — providing a powerful incentive to find every error;
• Expand the payment recapture audit requirement beyond contract payments to include benefit, grant, and loan payments;
• Add sanctions for programs that are deemed non-compliant with the law; and
• Allow OMB to conduct pilots to test accountability mechanisms with appropriate incentives and consequences tied to success in eliminating and recovering program errors.

See Congress Presses Forward on Improper Payments by Peter R. Orszag, April 28, 2010.