$123 billion paid wrong: The data to stop it existed. Nobody checked.

Two-thirds of the government's $185.8B in improper payments in fiscal 2025 happened because the agency didn't check information it already had access to — by the government's own count.

FraudBadPublic receipt
All reporting federal programs

Improper and unverifiable payments, FY2025$185.8B¹
Data existed and was accessible; not checked$123.0B¹
Data existed; agency couldn't get it$13.6B¹
Data needed didn't exist$26.5B¹
Not enough paperwork to tell either way$14.3B¹
Right amount, rules not followed$8.4B¹
Agencies out of compliance with the payment-integrity law, FY202415 of 63¹
Which payments, to whom████████████████

fraudbad.comNo taxation without receipts

What happened

Every federal program that reports improper payments has to say why they happened, using categories set by the Office of Management and Budget.

The biggest category is "failure to access data." OMB defines it as errors made even though the information needed to check the payment "exists and is accessible" to the agency. In fiscal 2025 that category alone was $123.0B — 66% of the total.

Why nobody caught it

15 of the 63 agencies tracked were out of compliance with the Payment Integrity Information Act in fiscal 2024, including Health and Human Services, Treasury, Social Security, Agriculture, Defense, Veterans Affairs, HUD, SBA and Labor.
In fiscal 2025 agencies flagged $77.5B in overpayments to claw back and recovered $47.8B.

How sure are we?

Paid without proof

Officially counted as paid in error or without the records to prove it was right. Some is fraud. Nobody has measured how much.

Root causes are reported by each agency to OMB. FraudBad summed them from the official FY2025 dataset; the total matches the $186 billion GAO reports. These describe errors, not intent.

Sources

FY2025 improper payments dataset: every program's results, root causes, recoveries and compliance (FY2004–FY2025)PaymentAccuracy.gov (OMB and CFO Council); totals summed by FraudBad · Nov 9, 2026
M-21-19: Appendix C to Circular A-123, Requirements for Payment Integrity Improvement (root-cause definitions, Table 3)Office of Management and Budget · Mar 5, 2021
GAO reports improper payments rose to an estimated $186 billion in fiscal year 2025U.S. Government Accountability Office · Apr 27, 2026

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