After years of record-breaking inflation and cost increases, many Pennsylvanians have seen their savings eviscerated.

As Pennsylvanians continue to struggle with their personal finances, they continue to send their hard-earned money to Harrisburg, where they expect state government to be good stewards of their money. Unfortunately, too often, state government failed to meet this expectation, with the Department of Human Services being cited by the federal government for having an improper payment rate of 14% in Medicaid and 20% in CHIP under the Wolf Administration.

In the near future, we will introduce legislation to safeguard taxpayers' hard-earned money by addressing and further mitigating improper payments made by state government. An improper payment, as defined by Federal Law going back to 2002, includes any overpayment, underpayment, or payment to ineligible recipients.

Our proposal requires each commonwealth agency to perform a review and assessment of each program that is not already subject to the federal Payment Integrity Information Act of 2019 to determine which programs are vulnerable to improper payments.

Additionally, each agency will be required to perform this assessment every two years, and the Secretary of the Budget is required to provide a publicly accessible website to provide taxpayers with the following:

• Each Commonwealth agency’s biennial improper payment assessments.
• Each Commonwealth agency’s total improper payments in dollar value and total improper payment error rate.
• Each Commonwealth agency’s high-risk program, the dollar value of improper payments for each high-risk program, and the improper payment error rate percentage for each high-priority program.
• Each Commonwealth agency’s high-risk program corrective action plan and a summary of the status of completing the corrective action plan; and
• The recovery of improper payments for each program in total dollars and as a percentage.

Furthermore, the legislation will require each political subdivision to annually submit a single audit to the budget office and participate in agency improper payment assessments. Similar to the powers provided to the federal government under the Payment Integrity Information Act of 2019, this proposal would provide the Commonwealth with the authority to issue a disallowance and require localities to issue repayment to the Commonwealth.

A political subdivision may be issued a disallowance for programs where the use of state dollars by the political subdivision has an improper payment rate exceeding 5%.

Please join us in cosponsoring this commonsense legislation to protect taxpayer funds from improper payments by state and local governments.