It’s time once again to look at some numbers.

Being so close to reaching the end of yet another calendar, this is the traditional time when all entities take a step back and talk about what they’ve accomplished in the last year. Since it’s one of my favorite topics, let’s take a look at government audit activities. As is my custom, I’ll also be happy to tell you what the numbers actually represent.

I have already covered the reported numbers for RAC activity for Fiscal Year 2011 in a previous post. For today’s missive, I thought I’d focus on three sets of numbers that came out of the Executive branch over the past month.

Let’s start with a big number. On the 15th of November, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) announced that agencies throughout the government cut improper payments by $17.6 billion. Roughly $1.1 billion of this money came from reductions in the payment error rate under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (or “SNAP”; I grew up calling this “food stamps”) and Pell Grants for higher education, but the balance overwhelmingly was under the different branches of the Medicare program, with a cumulative savings of $12 billion from Medicare Parts A, B & C. Isn’t it amazing that faulty bombers costing billions are allowed to let slide, but the government’s anti-fraud focus is squarely on activities such as eating, wellness and making yourself smarter?

Next, we go to money collected due to government-wide anti-fraud efforts. On December 13th, another report was released with great fanfare by Vice- President Joe Biden which showed fraud recoveries totalling $5.6 billion across all agencies. To add to this number in the coming year, HHS is asking Medicare Part D plans to crack down on painkiller fraud, notably excessive prescribing of OxyContin. If the way people drive in front of me is any indication, these should be target-rich investigations. 

Which, thanks to the inevitable trickle-down, brings us to anti-fraud efforts for CMS. Over $2.9 billion dollars in fraudulent payments was recovered in Fiscal Year 2011. Over $1 billion of that total has come from the HEAT team activity that was expanded to nine cities during the Fiscal Year. I am critical of audit entities in this space for not showing the proper aptitudes in their tasks, but as a taxpayer, I am 100% in favor of the HEAT team approach. The providers that are being perp-walked by these joint HHS-Department of Justice strike forces are literally scum-of-the-Earth thieves, and there shouldn’t be one person in their right mind bemoaning the fact that they are taken off the field in a HEAT dragnet.

Going further, the government announced that $2.8 billion in fraudulent payments had been collected from qui tam, or “whistleblower” cases, which stands as a new record for such suits. Of that number, $2.4 billion was the result of fraud committed against federal healthcare programs. The number of whistleblower suits reached an all-time high of 638 in FY2011. As people begin to know the rules, they become more likely to realize that what is going on around them is illegal. As a compliance officer, I can tell you that this can be either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on the person doing the finger-pointing. It is yet another salient reminder to make sure that all employees in organizations that receive remuneration from Medicare know why things are happening. If they don’t, they should always be aware of the reporting structure for problems within your organization.

If you haven’t internalized the idea by now, let me reiterate it. It’s a new world out there. Medicare checks suddenly have quite a few more strings attached than they used to at the beginnings of the program. There’s is a lot more to worry about, and loading up on Tums isn’t going to make the issues disappear. The numbers above keep getting larger. Do your best to make sure that future numbers such as these affect someone else.