Pursuit's Take
The Department of Defense Office of Inspector General (OIG) issued a report auditing the improper payment reporting of two programs in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Finance center. The Improper Payments Elimination and Recovery Act of 2010 (IPERA) requires agencies to report “a statistically valid estimate of improper payments for each program deemed susceptible to significant improper payments.”
The first was Army Corp Finance Center’s Commercial Pay program. The Army Corps reported $0 in improper payments out of its $18.1 billion in reported commercial payments in the program. The OIG found that the Army Corps did not subject $144.5 million to improper payment testing at all and missed $2.2 million in improper payments. The OIG concluded that until the Army Corps Commercial pay program “establishes adequate procedures to identify improper payments, USACE will not recover a potential $2.22 million in questioned costs.”
The second program that was examined by the OIG was the Travel Pay payments. The Army Corps reported $380,000 in improper payments out of $188 million in total payments. The OIG found that they had not subjected 26,400 travel payments worth $17.77 million to improper payment testing and underestimated their improper payment estimate by at least 3.73 million – a 10-fold increase from their reported estimate.
Improper Payment Reporting At Army Corp's Travel Payments Program