Federal Efforts To Combat Fraud in Government Programs

An investigation of seven Federal agencies indicated that fraud is a problem of critical proportion, with its incidence ranging somewhere between 1 percent and 10 percent of the expenditures of economic assistance programs. Federal agencies have not been doing enough to identify fraud in their programs, and the Department of Justice has been slow to assist, coordinate, and monitor the antifraud efforts of Federal agencies. The various Federal programs agencies agree that more needs to be done to effectively cope with fraud and abuse in the programs, and most have recently made fraud identification a high priority and have fixed organizational responsibility for fraud detection.