Treasury Implements Commonsense Efforts to Reduce Improper Payments

The Treasury Department announced today that it had significantly expanded the reach of the federal “Do Not Pay” system over the past fiscal year, verifying more than $3.7 trillion in payments in Fiscal Year (FY) 2026 as part of its effort to crack down on waste, fraud, errors, and abuse in federal payments.

According to Treasury’s press release, access to the Do Not Pay system, which “provides federal agencies and federally funded state-administered programs access to data and services to verify recipient identity and eligibility before making an award or issuing a payment,” grew from 4% of federal programs at the end of FY 2025 to 99% by the end of FY 2026. This was accomplished by streamlining the Do Not Pay onboarding process and accelerating data-sharing and privacy compliance processes. Treasury also added nine new datasets to the system, increasing its effectiveness.

This expansion of Do Not Pay resulted in the screening of over 2.3 billion records in FY 2026 as opposed to 641 million in FY 2025.

Treasury also touted its implementation of “additional safeguards” developed within the federal government to help verify payments before they are made rather than making the payments and attempting to recover them. It estimates that over 1.1 billion payments, equaling $3.7 trillion, were screened; of those, Treasury identified 13,500 payments adding up to $175 million that would have gone to people who had passed away but were instead returned before payment.

Tackling waste, fraud, errors, and abuse in federal spending is an important objective in the stewardship of taxpayer dollars. While the potential savings of these efforts are small, they are a commonsense approach that can help ensure the federal government is only making payments that are valid, and they should be expanded where possible in a cost-effective manner.