Federal Government to Prevent "Improper Payments"

In yet another sign that the federal government is an over funded, grotesquely wasteful bureaucracy, President Obama announced that he has signed legislation which has the aim of reducing the $100 billion plus of "improper" payments made each year.

"Federal agencies would have to redouble their efforts to identify and recover billions of dollars lost annually to wasteful spending under a bill President Barack Obama was signing into law Thursday.

He also was expected to announce a goal of reducing improper payments by $50 billion by 2012.

With the federal debt and people's worries about government red ink mounting, the bill marked the latest effort by the Obama administration to get a tighter handle on Washington spending.

Improper payments — from outright fraud to checks issued to the wrong person or for the wrong amount because of a typo — reached a high of nearly $110 billion last year, according to the White House. Federal auditors found that millions of dollars in benefits went to dead people, fugitives or others not eligible for them.

Key elements of the bill will require more agencies to report waste and to produce audited, corrective action plans with targets to reduce the errors that lead to such improper payments. The bill also requires all agencies that spend more than $1 million to conduct recovery audits on their programs."

How much more of a sign do we need that the government simply wastes the money it extracts from the populace? This bill doesn't even address wasteful payments made by the government, just payments made in error.

And by seeking to reduce the amount of annual improper payments only by roughly half, the federal government is signaling that it is either ok with the remaining amount of waste or is acknowledging that it is powerless to prevent a staggering amount of waste from occurring.

Is it possible that at least some of these apparently unauditable and unknown "improper payments" are knowingly made by federal employees to their friends or cronies? I think so.

How many for-profit businesses have a problem with "improper payments" on a scale of anything remotely like this? None that I'm aware of. Even if they did, they would fix this issue post-haste, and not settle for resolving only 50% of the problem.

This is simply another reason to de-fund the federal government, since the funds it claims from ordinary citizens as tax revenue are either wasted on programs that shouldn't exist in the first place, are otherwise improperly paid to people that aren't owed what they receive, or are simply being stolen outright.