Some other sobering facts from the two watchdog reports:
- Mistaken payments were made to dead people, totaling $871.9 million in fiscal year 2019.
- Six million 112-year-olds have active Social Security numbers, despite there only being 40 people older than that known to be currently alive in the world.
- Medicaid and Medicare significantly increased their mistaken payments, from $88.6 billion in 2017 to $103.6 billion in 2019.
- The Internal Revenue Service spent $17.4 billion improperly via the Earned Income Tax Credit program, which was about 25 percent of all its payment.
One bright spot, though, was the U.S. Education Department where was the Department of Education, which overpaid $6 billion in PELL grants and student loans to college students in 2018 but reduced that figure to $1.1 billion in 2019.
Read the full article at the source: The hefty price tag for errant government spending: $2.3 trillion since 2004 | Just The News