Improper payments

Organizations that represent IRS managers and employees say they haven’t been given much detail on the agency resuming more of its operations.

IRS Commissioner Chuck reopening processing and call centers will require some employees to work different shifts in order to meet social distancing recommendations.

The IRS moved and the Treasury Department rushed to get millions of payments out to the public in the week and months after Congress passed the CARES Act, but in doing so sent more than a million payments to people who have died.

The Republican Study Committee has joined a growing number of congressional members calling for hiring and pay changes designed to help the federal workforce better respond to the coronavirus pandemic.

The inspector general at the Office of Personnel Management said the uncertainty surrounding the agency’s proposed merger with the General Services Administration is continued concern headed in 2020.

VA Inspector General Michael Missal joined Federal Drive with Tom Temin to share what the department found when looking into the status of last year’s improper payments.

GAO estimates agencies could save billions of dollars by reducing the number of agency programs with overlapping missions, but the OMB has yet to complete a comprehensive inventory of agency programs nearly a decade after Congress mandated it. 

In today’s Federal Newscast, the Merit Systems Protection Board finds between 1999 and 2016, only about 7 for ever 1000 new supervisors faced consequences for failing their probationary period.

Every year the federal government reports levels of improper payments of around $140 billion. The problem seems impervious to efforts to end it.

One of the biggest culprits of improper payments in the federal government — the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services — is making progress to combat the issue.