Improper federal payments since 2004 now exceed $1 trillion

When the federal government releases its 2015 financial statements on Thursday, they’ll show that the running tally of improper payments made since 2004 has now moved above the $1 trillion mark.

That’s despite several years of concerted efforts to reduce improper payments, including the Do Not Pay initiative. In 2014, agencies made a surprising $125 billion in estimated improper payments, $20 billion higher than earlier projections and the largest amount on record following several consecutive years of declines.

Precise figures for 2015 won’t be released until Thursday afternoon, when the Government Accountability Office publishes its audit report on the government’s consolidated financial statements. But Beryl Davis, GAO’s director for financial management and assurance, told an Association of Government Accountants conference that agencies had again reported a high number of improper payments in 2015, enough to bring the cumulative total to more than $1 trillion since the government first began collecting statistics as part of the 2002 Improper Payments Information Act.

“I think one factor is that we’re doing a better job of estimating what the government’s improper payments are than we’ve done in the past,” she said. “More and more agencies are doing better risk assessments and coming to more accurate conclusions. In some cases when the numbers go up, it’s not a negative. The improper payments were always there, they just weren’t estimated accurately and reported out.”

More