Even Democrats admit there’s massive government fraud

From the Wall Street Journal February 12th. And if you read to the end it seems like it shouldn't be that difficult to stem the bleeding.

This morning at a House Oversight subcommittee hearing on improper payments and fraud in government, Democrats attacked President Donald Trump and his adviser Elon Musk for their efforts to reform and reduce federal spending. But interestingly, even as they offered harsh partisan criticism, Democrats on the panel could not pretend that the level of fraud isn’t gigantic. It may be even more gigantic than they’ll admit.

Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D., N.M.) said at the hearing, according to a transcript from Congressional Quarterly:

I grew up working for small mom and pop family businesses and understand the necessity of balancing the books, making sure we can deliver, and fiscal responsibility. And that’s why today’s hearing is focused on making sure that the federal government is doing what it’s supposed to and digging into the more than $236 billion in improper payments that we see going out the door every single year, and we need to get to the bottom of that.

We sure do. Ms. Stansbury’s fellow Democrat Rep. Gerald Connolly represents a swampy district in the Virginia suburbs of D.C., but even his many constituents on federal payrolls did not prevent him from providing an even higher estimate for improper federal payments, which he said are “now in the range of $280 billion a year.”

But he too may be lowballing. Last year, Congress’s Government Accountability Office pegged the annual fraud losses of the federal government at somewhere between $233 billion and $521 billion.

But wait, there’s more. One of the witnesses at the hearing was Haywood Talcove, CEO of LexisNexis Risk Solutions for Government. He said that “for over a decade a silent war has been waged against American taxpayers” and added:

We continue to pay benefits to deceased and incarcerated individuals, direct money to bad actors flagged in the Do Not Pay list, and overlook duplicate Social Security numbers by not following best practices.

During the pandemic, a simple cross-check of PPP loan recipients against IRS records would have exposed massive fraud and prevented payments to transnational criminals, who sold their, quote/unquote, sauce on the dark web. To stop this, we must reclaim control of our systems not just from the criminal syndicates, but the flawed systems enabling them…

The private sector has fraud rates below 3 percent. Meanwhile, the public sector operates at a 20 percent fraud rate.

This suggests that even the staggering $521 billion fraud estimate might also be too low. It’s also more than reason enough for President Trump to honor his campaign promise to task Elon Musk with identifying such taxpayer fleecings. Underlining the virtue of selecting Mr. Musk, the appropriate application of technological expertise appears to be the most valuable intervention.

Here’s more of the CQ transcript of today’s hearing featuring Rep. Tim Burchett (R., Tenn.):

TIM BURCHETT:

How much money do you calculate is wasted due to waste, fraud, and abuse in the entitlement programs each year?

HAYWOOD TALCOVE:

Yeah. My number right now between federal, state, and local government is you can save $1 trillion a year by simply putting in front-end identity verification, eliminating self-certification, and monitoring the back-end of the programs that are providing the benefits, those three things.