Government Accounting Agency (GAO) auditors say the federal departments of Treasury, Veterans Affairs, Labor, and Agriculture compiled improper payment rates of 10% or more in all four years of President Joe Biden’s White House tenure.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS) also reached or exceeded the 10% improper payments rate during three of the four Biden years. The Department of Education did so for two of the four years.

A big part of the problem in stopping improper payments by federal agencies is that Congress probably doesn’t have enough information to assess accurately what needs to be done, according to GAO.

“Executive branch agencies are required to report improper payment estimates for each risk-susceptible program … To improve transparency, agencies that are noncompliant under the Payment Integrity Information Act of 2019 (PIIA) are required to report annually to Congress and GAO. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) provides guidance on PIIA requirements to agencies,” GAO, which is the investigative arm of Congress, said in the report.

“However, GAO found that the guidance does not direct noncompliant agencies to submit the required annual reports. Unless OMB updates its guidance, Congress may not have the information it needs to assess agencies’ actions to address improper payments and hold them accountable,” GAO continued.

The 10% threshold used by GAO in the report, however, can be misleading regarding the actual severity and extent of the improper payments. At the Department of Treasury, for example, the IRS management of the Additional Child Tax Credit showed improper payment rates of 13.3% in 2021, 15.8% in 2022, 14.5% in 2023, and 10.7% in 2024, for a four-year average of 13.6% of all such payments being in the wrong amount or sent to the incorrect recipient.

The federal tax agency did no better in its management of the American Opportunity Tax Credit, showing improper payment rates of 26.3% in 2021, 36.1% in 2022, 31.6% in 2023, and 27.7% in 2024, for a four-year average of 30.4% of all payments under the program going to the wrong recipient or in an incorrect amount paid.

And under the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), IRS officials compiled a similarly poor showing, with a 27.8% figure for 2021, 31.6% for 2022, 33.5% for 2023, and 27.7% for 2024. That results in an average for the four-year tenure of Biden in the Oval Office of 31.05% in improper EITC payments.

To put those figures into a real dollar context, consider that according to the IRS, “23.5 million workers and families benefited from approximately $68.5 billion in EITC payments nationwide. The average EITC amount received nationwide for tax year 2024 was $2,916. The IRS estimates that about one in five EITC-eligible taxpayers don’t claim this valuable credit, underscoring the importance of the annual EITC Awareness Day outreach campaign.”

The dollar amounts involved in the American Opportunity Tax Credit and the Additional Child Tax Credit aren’t as huge but are nevertheless estimated together to equal more than $57 billion in payments.

At the Department of Veterans Affairs, managers compiled the highest improper payment rates among all federal agencies for three straight years under the Purchased Long-Term Services and Supports program, including 72.8% in 2021, 47.5% in 2022, and 38.7% in 2023, for a three-year average of 53% of all payments being improper. The VA’s percentages for the first three years were the highest in the government, but there was a dramatic improvement in 2024 to 13.5%. Even so, that was still significantly above GAO’s 10% threshold.

Federal officials have never been certain of how many tax dollars are lost each year to waste, fraud, and abuse, but in a 2024 report, GAO estimated the total, not including improper payment losses, could be as high as $521 billion every year. But under President Donald Trump, and in cooperation with congressional Republicans, including especially Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) and House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.), new tougher common sense policy measures are being implemented, as well as a growing list of highly sophisticated data analysis approaches.

Baseline Policy President and Founder Matthew Dickerson, for example, told The Washington Stand he believes that thanks to “the Trump administration’s Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, the Department of Health and Human Services is finally requiring state Medicaid Fraud Control Units to comply fully with all the federal requirements or else lose federal funding. Just yesterday [June 4], HHS decertified Hawaii’s Medicaid Fraud Control Unit due to its lack of enforcement. This sends a signal to states who administer the federal program: Start taking the fraud problem seriously.”

Romina Boccia, a veteran federal spending analyst who serves as director of Budget and Entitlement Policy at the Cato Institute, told TWS the new approach is asking tough questions that should have been asked of federal officials years ago.

“What GAO’s study reveals is that the federal government has struggled for decades to control improper payments. The same programs keep appearing on GAO’s high-risk lists because they hand out vast sums of federal taxpayer dollars with complicated eligibility rules and inadequate verification systems. Rather than being driven by one administration or another, GAO’s findings highlight that some of the largest sources of improper payments stem from legislative choices that Congress refuses to fix,” Boccia said.

The problem was intensified during the COVID pandemic when Congress approved massive emergency spending provisions that emphasized “speed over verification, suspending or weakening eligibility checks, and overwhelming state and federal administrative capacity with a massive increase in claimant volume that created opportunities for fraudsters to exploit program weaknesses,” she continued.

Boccia is hopeful of significant progress because “the Trump administration is pushing stronger identity verification, data sharing, and pre-payment screening, which is moving in the right direction. Preventing improper payments is almost always easier and cheaper than recovering federal funds after the fact. Administrative reforms can help address some of the problems, but bigger fixes will require congressional action and stronger incentives for states administering high-risk programs like unemployment insurance, Medicaid, and food stamps to prevent errors in the first place.”