OMB launches website to publicly hold agencies accountable for improper payments

Jennifer Trezza/Nextgov.com

The Office of Management and Budget on Thursday launched a website that is intended to publicly hold agencies accountable for payments distributed in error to vendors, benefit recipients and even schoolchildren.

PaymentAccuracy.gov is part of an ongoing effort to rein in the $100 billion wasted on improper payments each year by better utilizing information technology and asking citizens for help, OMB officials said. On June 18, President Obama issued an executive order directing agencies to search multiple databases, including the Social Security Administration's file of deceased people and the General Services Administration's list of barred contractors, to determine a recipients' eligibility before distributing taxpayer dollars. OMB is developing a single checkpoint online that will combine a system that names companies disqualified from government contracts with other databases that list people who are ineligible for entitlements .

In the meantime, agencies are responsible for consulting each inventory, even if they have to do so manually, and reporting any payment mistakes to OMB.

"We're not waiting for the full integration before agency responsibility kicks in. The do-not-pay list starts today," said Daniel Werfel, controller in OMB's office of federal financial management, the lead architect behind PaymentAccuracy.gov. He was citing the executive order that kicked in last week.

Knowing that agencies' mistakes will appear online motivates them to resolve outstanding issues before they are publicized on the website to citizens and colleagues, Werfel added. Federal employees should not be shocked when they see the amounts misappropriated because they are responsible for reporting the data and are highly involved in vetting the numbers before they are posted, he added.

The website shows the rates and amounts of improper payments for each agency, as well as the target figures they have set for reducing and recovering wasted funds.

Each quarter, the Top 10 highest-dollar improper payments will be highlighted on the site. Right now, the Transportation Department's expenditure of $13,597,230 is No. 1, followed by the Health and Human Service's $959,031 erroneous payout.

Internet users who visit the site are encouraged to submit instances of fraud, waste or abuse they witness in local communities.

"We think there's an accountability element here. You don't want to be on the Top 10 list," Werfel said. "There's the transparency breeding accountability."

All the raw numbers powering the site are available for download on Data.gov , the government's clearinghouse of federal statistics, for third parties to repurpose on their own websites.

In 2009, we had a significant spike in the number of improper payments compared to 2008, in large part due to Medicare," Werfel said, referring to the health care assistance program for senior citizens. The administration used stricter criteria to measure error rates, which resulted in more discoveries of improper payments. In November, shortly after this finding, the president ramped up efforts to trace and prevent improper payments.

So far, PaymentAccuracy.gov site has spotlighted one major success story, White House officials said. The error rate for the Agriculture Department, which disbursed a flood of food aid when the economy soured, fell to an all-time low of 4.36 percent in 2009, down from 5.01 percent in 2008. In 2009, Agriculture issued more than $50.3 billion in benefits for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as the food stamp program.

"If the error rate had remained at 5.01 percent, $330 million in additional errors would have occurred," OMB Director Peter Orszag wrote on the White House blog on Thursday. "By consolidating information on improper payments and making this information transparent to the public, we are assisting -- in fact, asking -- the American people to help hold federal agencies accountable for responsibly managing taxpayer dollars."

But OMB officials have not yet detected whether the stimulus package caused an uptick in improper payments for other programs, such as home-buying incentives and mortgage assistance ventures.

Will there be agencies where the stimulus created additional risk and the errors picked up? Potentially. But I'm not aware of it," Werfel said.