Federal Manager's Daily Report

Improper payments have been a long-running issue for individual agencies. Image: Lisa-S/Shutterstock.com

OMB has said that the government-wide improper payment rate “meaningfully declined” in fiscal 2022 from 7.2 to 5.1 percent, “even as a number of new programs, including pandemic relief programs, reported for the first time.”

“This decrease is an important step in the right direction and reflects ongoing work OMB has been leading with federal agencies to improve payment integrity, including to implement the Payment Integrity Information Act of 2019. But our work isn’t finished—and the data makes clear that Federal agencies have more to do to drive down improper payments in both newer and long-standing programs,” a blog post said.

The latest data by agency and program are at paymentaccuracy.gov.

Improper payments have been a long-running issue for individual agencies and as a government-wide management priority, and remains an area of an open high-priority recommendation from the GAO. As the government uses the term, that includes not only overpayments but also underpayments and payments that were correct but incorrectly or incompletely documented.

The OMB cited guidance it issued to agencies on major spending bills enacted under the Biden White House including the American Rescue Plan, the Infrastructure and Investments Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act. That included requiring agencies to provide additional information about improper payments in their annual financial statements and “fine-tuning their data collection and estimation methodologies to reduce the number of unknown payments.”

It added that special unemployment insurance benefits provided in response to the pandemic “brought to the surface” problems with state-run systems to administer those benefits. It said the Labor Department “ is working closely with state UI agencies on reforms and providing funding aimed at driving down the improper payment rate while reinforcing that payment integrity must be a priority for the UI program.”

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