First posted on Instagram
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced new fraud-prevention measures in St. Cloud, Minnesota, on October 30, alongside other senior U.S. officials, as part of the White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, and set out the Treasury Department's totals from the past year in its crackdown on fraud against taxpayer-funded programs.
Over the past year, Bessent said, Treasury returned $175 million in payments that would have gone to deceased individuals and expanded access to the government's Do Not Pay fraud-checking program to 99 percent of federal programs. Treasury's October 6 update said the department had screened more than 1.1 billion federal payments totalling $3.7 trillion and identified 13,500 fraudulent payments worth $175 million that would have gone to deceased people.
Bessent said Treasury stopped almost $190 million in funds tied to overseas fraud and returned more than $100 million to U.S. victims, figures he repeated in Minnesota on October 30. "When greed meets negligence, the American people suffer," Bessent said in the Treasury Department's Minnesota announcement, adding that Treasury was working with the White House task force "to help prevent this kind of abuse from happening again, in Minnesota or anywhere else."
Bessent also said Treasury ordered an audit of approximately $9 billion in Treasury contracts, a review of preference-based contracting announced in November 2025 after the department suspended and terminated all contracts with Native-owned ATI Government Solutions following fraud allegations involving more than $253 million in awards. The review examines potential misuse of contracting preferences through pass-through arrangements, in which eligible small businesses retain fees for minimal participation while subcontracting nearly all the work.
In Minnesota, Treasury's announcement pointed to enforcement already under way: Salim Said, a co-conspirator in the Feeding Our Future scheme that defrauded the Federal Child Nutrition Program of $49 million, was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison this week. Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network also issued an alert asking financial institutions to watch for suspicious cross-border payments, after U.S. institutions reported more than $8 billion in potentially suspicious wire payments sent through U.S.-based money service businesses at the direction of foreign agents between 2021 and 2025, and a separate notice on the exploitation of charities and non-profit organisations.
Bessent said Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service have also proposed stronger eligibility checks for health insurance tax credits, and that the department continues to work with U.S. banks to prevent government benefits fraud before payments go out.
The wider administration context, as set out in the White House's fraud-pledge release, is that the Trump administration says it has uncovered more than $260 billion in fraud across government programs since taking office — an administration estimate, not a confirmed recovery total — with Treasury's figures forming part of that broader anti-fraud push.