CHAMBERSBURG – When Stacy Garrity released the Pennsylvania Treasury Department’s Payment Production and Improper Payments Report, taxpayers were given a glimpse into how much money was almost spent

The report identified and prevented 18,765 improper payments totaling nearly $820 million.

The program has been around for many years, but this is the first time the findings have been released to the public. 

Attorney Clint Barkdoll said, “This is a good announcement. You can go online and look at what all these improper payments were. Pennsylvania averages about a billion dollars a year that the state treasury intercepts in improper payments. But I think she correctly and smartly is saying, let’s put this out for the public to see. The Treasury did an audit that dug into this at a deeper level than they’ve done.”

This is the first time the Treasury ever did an audit of this internal process. 

Barkdoll said, “That’s what’s helping get all this online. I went online and looked at the report. You can go to patreasury.gov to see this, and it is astounding the improper payments, and a lot of it are like department requisitions.”

The Human Services Department is a big one for requisitions. 

Barkdoll said, “They’re submitting billing or reimbursement receipts or requests that have either already been paid or have never been formally approved. So then they have to go back through a process to get it approved. And yeah, just for this past year, it amounted to over $800 million in those kinds of transactions.”

While they got intercepted on the front end, some of them turned around and went through the proper channels. 

Barkdoll said, “They resubmitted them to eventually get paid. Some of them, no doubt, just got rejected entirely. There was never any payment, but over 800 million on the front end flagged these receipts, these invoices for, and they didn’t pay them when they first came in.”

Michele Jansen of News Talk 103.7FM noted, “What I’d be curious to see is from year to year to year, was there any any changes made to make this better, to make the process better, to not waste so much money on the redoing, to get rid of the ones that actually ended up virtually stealing the money? It’s fine if they’re going to do it every year. But it sounds like she’s saying no. We need to make it public. We need to really look at and make changes.”

Barkdoll said, “There’s a number in the report that since 2019-20, when they started to make these reports, not public, but they were able to generate these internal reports. There’s been about $5 billion in payments that have been prevented by the state treasury, and again, if you just divide that over the last say six years, it looks like a fairly consistent number year to year, and it does make you wonder at these state agencies what are they doing then internally to prevent this? So you look at the numbers. Like the LCB was another entity. Over 3,000 improper payments were intercepted. The Department of Revenue was almost 8,000. So these are very high volume transactions that the Treasury is intercepting.”