Ranking Member Mfume's Opening Statement at Subcommittee Hearing on Improper Payments

Thank you Chairman Sessions for again convening us on this very important topic. Since the beginning of the 118th Congress, my colleagues and I on the House Oversight Committee on both sides of the aisle have been laser focused on combating waste, fraud and abuse within our federal government. And it's for the most part not been a partisan issue. No matter what side of the aisle you're on, we should be able to agree, I think, that every single cent of people's money that we spend ought to be going to its intended purpose. From our conversations with the distinguished panelists who have appeared at several other hearings as well as the helpful work of the Government Accountability Office, the Pandemic Accountability Response Committee and others, we've learned that the potential extent of improper payments and fraud within our government is, for lack of a better word, simply astounding. For example, in April of this year, as was mentioned by Ms. Brown earlier, the GAO released a report estimating that between $233 and $521 billion per year worth of fraud occurred in the span of 2018 to 2022. While the Office of Management and Budget has taken significant issue with the methodology for obtaining these figures, there is no doubt that there is a very, very large level of fraud that has occurred. On the improper payments front, this past March, the GAO reported a total of $235 billion in improper payments to government entities in the last fiscal year. That's almost by $100 billion, at least by the numbers that I have since 2015. In recognition of what I consider is a shared challenge, Chairman Sessions and I have been working roughly for about a year on a bipartisan basis to create a congressional scorecard to assess the progress of key government spending programs in reducing fraud and improper payments. The federal programs on this scorecard were selected because they represent those in many instances with the highest fraud risk per dollar. The Earned Income Tax Credit, which has helped 359,000 people in the state of Maryland alone to be able to make ends meet last year, is on that scorecard. The Supplemental Security Income, which keeps the lights on for more than 35,000 of my eligible constituents alone, is on that scorecard as well. And so it is increasingly and crucially important for me, and I will say for all members of this committee, that we assess the degree of fraud and progress in combating fraud and the improper payments in these programs because they've been so successful in keeping our country afloat, particularly during the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Thanks to the policies passed by a large bipartisan majority during the beginning of the pandemic and the American Rescue Plan passed by congressional Democrats and signed into law by the Biden-Harris administration, the United States has had the largest and the strongest economic recovery out of the entire developed world. So many of us believe that Congress should defend those programs from those that seek to abuse them deliberately over and over again by strengthening, as we've heard today, the executive branch's ability to track the success in ongoing prevention efforts. And before I conclude, I would also be compelled, Mr. Chairman, to mention the importance of investing in solutions that we already know are effective in combating waste, fraud and abuse. In the Council of the Inspector General for Integrity and Efficiency's 2023 report to the House and to the President, it was found that for every dollar spent on the Office of Inspectors General, $26 was saved by the federal government. It may sound like a small amount, but when we talk about billions of dollars, it is significant. So I would continue to urge my colleagues to consider the benefits of further investments in the OIGs to achieve greater cost savings for all of us. Furthermore, Larry Turner, the Department of Labor Inspector General, has done an exemplary work in investigating and potential benefits of data analytics, which we've talked about often in preventing fraud, and found that the use of such analytics could have prevented much of the unemployment insurance fraud that occurred during the pandemic. So I'm very interested in learning more about how this committee and indeed the entire Congress can invest in those kinds of tools for prevention. Our subcommittee has tried to be an island of bipartisan productivity and a storm of what really has been a chaotic 118th Congress. I'm proud of the work we've done and the strength and the cooperation across party lines to get us to this point. I look forward to hearing more about this topic today. Mr. Chairman, I again want to thank you and I would yield back any time I might have.