Sessions introduces bill to set up a new Treasury fraud watchdog
The bill would require that the new watchdog establish an anti-fraud data platform like the one housed in the government’s Pandemic Response Accountability Committee. It would also expand Treasury's financial and program integrity services.
The hope is that the legislation will push the federal government from a pay-and-chase paradigm of recovering stolen funds from bad actors to preventing fraudulent payments from happening at all, Sessions said during a hearing this week.
“During COVID, we learned that it is far too easy to commit fraud in federal programs,” he said in a statement. “We also learned that once the money goes out the door to a fraudster, the vast majority is gone for good.”
Congress set up the PRAC in early 2020 to oversee relief spending during the pandemic, when an estimated hundreds of billions of dollars was doled out to fraudsters as the government rushed to get aid to those that needed it.
The PRAC — lauded for its data analytics center — was set to sunset last year until Congress extended its life through 2034 last summer.
Under Sessions’s proposal, the new IG would incorporate, to the extent it can, the existing data platform maintained by the PRAC and occupy a government-wide role in helping other agency watchdogs find fraud in government awards over $50,000.
Robert Westbrooks, a former inspector general and the first head of the PRAC, said during Wednesday's House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Government Operations hearing that data is crucial to anti-fraud efforts. Sessions is the chairman of that subcommittee, in addition to serving as co-chair of the House DOGE Caucus.
“It’s absolutely critical that we’ve got a centralized repository for government information that has the legal authorities to share that data with state and local partners,” he said. “I think that was the secret sauce that we had with the PRAC.”
The new bill would also task Treasury’s Bureau of Fiscal Service with maintaining a government-wide data analysis program to help government agencies and states disbursing federal funds to detect and prevent improper payments and fraud.
Treasury already maintains another system, called Do Not Pay, a no-cost service for government agencies to verify claim eligibility before issuing loans, benefits, and vendor and grant payments.
The proposal from Sessions comes after President Donald Trump fired nearly 20 IGs last year. The administration has also requested an average of 12% less in funding for Cabinet-level IGs in its fiscal 2027 budget proposal as compared to fiscal 2024, according to a recent analysis.
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