$55 Billion In "Improper" Spending

Subject: $55 Billion In "Improper" Spending Sun Feb 10, 2008 6:43 pm

When you do as many stories on government waste and fraud as I do, you can almost start to believe that if the misspending could be wiped out, we'd have enough money to pay for all of our needs, help the guys next door, and still have money leftover to give some back to hard working taxpayers.

The scope of "improper payments," as the government calls them, is so huge, it's counted in terms of billions of dollars. It's so huge, you may even begin to think a billion dollars isn't that much. You forget that a billion is it's a thousand million. And that a million is a thousand thousand . And so on.

A new report from the GAO has some upsetting figures on this front. Congress now requires major executive branches to report how much in improper payments (of your tax dollars) they believe they make in a given year. For fiscal year 2007, the GAO reports the total is $55 billion dollars. That amounts to about "2% of the total federal executive branch agencies'" spending, which right about now totals almost $2.8 trillion. Now that's huge.

Most of the $55 billion in improper payments comes from eight programs and "other":

* Medicaid: $12.9 billion

* Earned Income Tax Credit: $11.4 billion

* Medicare fee-for-service: $10.8 billion

* "Other": $6.7 billion

* Supplemental Security Income: $4.1 billion

* Unemployment Insurance: $3.2 billion

* Old Age Survivors' Insurance $2.5 billion

* Food Stamps: $1.8 billion

* National School Lunch Program: $1.4 billion

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$55 Billion In "Improper" Spending

$55 Billion In "Improper" Spending

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