Why do improper payments happen? Break it down by root cause for 2025
Top 5 by improper payments in FY2025. Leading: Failure to Access Data/Information Needed ($123.03B); Data/Information Needed Does Not Exist ($26.48B); Insufficient Documentation to Determine ($14.29B).
| Root cause | Improper payments |
|---|---|
| Failure to Access Data/Information Needed | $123.03B |
| Data/Information Needed Does Not Exist | $26.48B |
| Insufficient Documentation to Determine | $14.29B |
| Inability to Access the Data/Information | $13.65B |
| Technically improper (right amount, rules not met) | $8.39B |
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How to read this
- Improper payments are agencies' own estimates from samples (PaymentAccuracy.gov, OMB, under the Payment Integrity Information Act): payments that should not have been made or were the wrong amount, plus unknown payments the agency couldn't show were proper. They are not all losses (underpayments and documentation gaps count) and not fraud as such; only risk-susceptible programs are measured.
- Years are the fiscal year of the report; each estimate usually samples payments from an earlier 12 months. Programs join and leave the list, so totals across years compare different sets of programs.
- Root causes use OMB's categories from FY2021 on; in some years their totals differ from the program totals.