The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic has tallied up a total of $191 billion of fraudulent claims paid out through state unemployment insurance (UI) agencies to hackers and fraudsters – up from previous estimates that put the fraud figure closer to $100 billion. […]

Reps. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., and Kevin Kiley, R-Calif., introduced a bipartisan bill on Friday that would increase the maximum penalties for various kinds of fraud committed with the help of AI technology. […]

The Treasury Department announced Thursday that its efforts in taking a technology and data-driven approach to fraud and improper payment prevention saved more than $4 billion in fiscal year (FY) 2023, including recovering $1 billion by leveraging AI. […]

The Pandemic Responsibility and Accountability Committee (PRAC) has released a new report for policymakers that highlights recommendations to aid in preventing and detecting fraud and improper payments in government programs. […]

VA, Veterans Affairs

The White House and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) announced a new website to protect veterans and their families from scams, which will help keep those receiving VA benefits informed and protected against fraud schemes.   […]

The Pandemic Responsibility and Accountability Committee (PRAC) has released a new report for Federal and state program administrators that outlines recommendations on how to better protect government programs from fraud and abuse – including by upgrading out-of-date IT systems. […]

The Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PRAC) published a new report stating that legacy IT systems at the Department of Labor (DoL) and state and local governments are an overarching issue within the DoL’s unemployment insurance (UI) program. […]

The Department of Justice (DoJ) announced on Wednesday that it has seized over $1.4 billion in COVID-19 relief funding stolen by criminals since the start of the pandemic, with over $200 million recovered in the past three months. […]

The Small Business Administration (SBA) Office of Inspector General (OIG) issued a new report today estimating that of the $1.2 trillion SBA disbursed through its pandemic assistance loan programs, over $200 billion was potentially fraudulent. […]

The Small Business Administration (SBA) Office of the Inspector General (OIG) has ranked IT investments as one of the top eight “critically important” challenges for the agency in the OIG’s first half fiscal year (FY) 2023 Semiannual Report to Congress. […]

Senate hearing Congressional-min

A group of Republican senators sent a letter this week to Attorney General Merrick Garland and Labor Secretary Marty Walsh asking for progress on the government’s efforts to prevent fraudulent COVID-19 funding claims, and to recoup any of the billions of dollars of relief funding estimated to have been stolen by fraudsters. […]

The Department of Labor’s (DoL) Office of Inspector General (OIG) determined that the agency – along with state workforce agencies – has paid more than $45 billion in unemployment insurance (UI) pandemic benefits to fraudsters, according to an alert memorandum published on Sept. 21. […]

While the Small Business Administration (SBA) implemented several layers of controls to prevent foreign entities from perpetrating fraud within the agency’s COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) application system, some individuals with foreign-based IP addresses were still able to access the system. […]

USPS Postal Service

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has been working hard to reduce the amount of fraud the agency faces when it comes to veterans’ benefits claims, and better leveraging data and AI has been helping in that fight, said Erick Zenteno, program manager of Fraud Prevention Services at VA. […]

Cybersecurity

The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Office of Inspector General (OIG) said it uncovered a transnational fraud ring that has impersonated DHS procurement officials in order to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars of IT equipment. […]

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) need to more fully align its antifraud efforts with the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) Fraud Risk Framework, GAO auditors said in a report released Dec. 5. CMS’s anti-fraud programs currently align only partially with the risk framework, GAO’s investigation revealed. […]

If Federal agencies invest upfront in technologies to track fraud and improper payments, the government could end up saving enough money to pay back some of the national debt or stave off sequestration, according to Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va. […]

Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell this week announced an anti-fraud task force led by the Justice and Health and Human Services Departments executed the largest takedown of health care fraud in U.S. history, charging 301 individuals in 36 Federal districts for health care schemes equaling $900 million. […]

Federal agencies and other organizations are increasingly relying on analytics to detect and stop fraud, but experts recommend they start with small projects and small data sets to pinpoint risk. Learn how the U.S. Postal Service, World Bank, General Services Administration, and IBM approach the use of big data analytics to prevent fraud in government. […]

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