How much Washington overpays.
How often it gets caught.

When CMS reports a 7.66% Medicare FFS improper-payment rate, the vast majority is insufficient documentation— a billing code that didn’t match the record, a missing physician signature — not a doctor who never saw the patient. When the Justice Department indicts an 11-defendant ring for $10.6 billion in phantom catheter claims, that is fraud. Both numbers are real. Both are on this page. They do not mean the same thing.

The Minnesota Office of the Legislative Auditor’s 2024 review of the Department of Education documents a specific chain: MDE flags Feeding Our Future as deficient in 2019 and labels it “seriously deficient”in December 2020 — then, after Feeding Our Future sues alleging racial discrimination and Judge John Guthmann holds MDE in contempt for slow-walking site approvals, MDE defersthe serious deficiency and keeps paying. The auditor’s conclusion, quoted in full:

“The threat of legal consequences and negative media attention affected MDE’s decisions about the regulatory actions it did and did not take against Feeding Our Future.”

MDE staff testifying under oath at the 2024 trial said no one gave them a top-down order to stop investigating — the effect was indirect, through litigation and public pressure. The Minnesota Judicial Branch issued a rare public statement correcting Governor Tim Walz’s characterization of the Guthmann orders. Both are part of the record.

The November 20, 2025 CalEPA Final Palisades Fire and Water Supply Analysis — a primary state report — concluded that even a full Santa Ynez Reservoir would have added only ~5,500 gallons per minute and would not have kept hydrants pressurized during the demand spike. The empty reservoir was a separate, parallel failure of maintenance governance, not the cause of the hydrant collapse. The honest frame is: two distinct oversight failures, not one.

A prosecution is not a verdict, and a verdict is not the whole record. Defendants in pending cases are presumed innocent. This page does not list every pending or unindicted case; only those with a live federal charging document or conviction. We do not include civil settlements where no admission of wrongdoing exists. We do not list state-level prosecutions except where the state case is the primary public record (California hospice, Arizona sober-living). The DOJ press release linked on each card is the authoritative description of the allegations.

Program-integrity funding inside federal agencies is a rounding error against the size of the programs themselves. Medicare spends about a trillion dollars a year; CMS’s program-integrity budget is under one-tenth of one percent of that. SBA moved $1.2 trillion in pandemic loans through a delegated network that earned fees per approved application. The dollars needed to catch fraud before it leaves the Treasury are tiny compared to the dollars needed to recover it after. Every audit on this page makes the same point, in different words.