Highlights from the PRAC Chair’s testimony before Congress

“If the PRAC and its data analytics function are allowed to sunset on September 30, 2025, we believe the federal government will no longer have an entity capable of proactively conducting cross-program, cross-agency analysis to help prevent improper payments in high-risk programs across federal agencies.”  

In the hearing, “Where Do We Go From Here? Examining a Path Forward to Assess Agencies’ Efforts to Prevent Improper Payments and Fraud,” Chair Horowitz shared details about the PRAC’s ongoing pandemic oversight accomplishments while urging Congress to make the Pandemic Analytics Center of Excellence (PACE) permanent and broaden its jurisdiction to all federal spending to help the federal oversight community better prevent and detect fraud, waste, abuse, and improper payments. 

Chair Horowitz emphasized in his testimony:   

The PRAC’s unique authorities allow us to partner on data-driven investigations 

The PACE can access law enforcement-sensitive data to find hidden connections involving multi-program criminal schemes, such as the use of shared bank account information, email addresses, and phone numbers, helping to find fraud that would otherwise stay hidden.  

As of August 2024, the PACE has provided investigative support to 48 federal law enforcement and Offices of Inspectors General (OIGs) partners on 935 pandemic-related investigations with over 22,000 subjects and an estimated fraud loss of more than $2.25 billion.  

The need for bipartisan legislation to sustain the PACE and strengthen pandemic fraud investigations  

Sustaining and expanding the PRAC’s data analytics center would save taxpayers billions of dollars by eliminating the need to recreate a data analytics center in response to the next crisis and continuing the critical work of preventing fraud and improper payments. It would provide advanced data analytics services to OIGs on an ongoing, permanent basis, allowing them to assist the agencies they oversee in screening applicants for benefits programs.  

In addition, the PRAC strongly supports legislative actions that would improve pandemic fraud investigations: 

• Extending the statute of limitations for all pandemic-related fraud from five to 10 years
  
• Reforming the Program Fraud Civil Remedies Act to raise the jurisdictional limit for administrative recoveries of “smaller” false or fraudulent claims from $150,000 to $1 million  

The time is now to prepare for future emergencies and safeguard annual federal spending