Reducing Improper Payments

This is an archival or historical document and may not reflect current policies or procedures.

Reducing Improper Payments / Introduction / Administrative Payments / Recovery Methods

Recovery Methods

Along with our comprehensive program to recover benefit overpayments, we have an extensive debt collection program to recover administrative overpayments to contractors and former employees resulting from payment errors. In FY 2020 we recovered $1.4 million in administrative debt through an array of internal and external debt collection tools.

Administrative Debt Overpayments - Detections and Recoveries
(dollars in millions)
Administrative Debt Overpayments Amount Identified FY 2020 Amount Recovered FY 2020 Amount Identified FY 2019 Amount Recovered FY 2019 Cumulative Amount Identified FY 2020 and 2019 Cumulative Amount Recovered FY 2020 and 2019
Total $2.4 $1.4 $1.8 $2.2 $4.2 $3.6

Notes:

  1. The totals mainly include identified and recovered overpayments from sources other than our in-house recovery audit program for vendor and employee travel payments and our payment accuracy reviews for payroll and benefits payments, which are discussed in the Recovery Auditing section.
  2. Identified overpayments in a given fiscal year represent identified debt that can span multiple fiscal years.
  3. We do not consider every overpayment improper according to the definition contained in PIIA.