Trump/Vance $250 Billion in Found Fraud Claims IS Probably Not True……

The New York Times took a look at the numbers and info in the White House task force report and found all kinds of holes in the report….

We’re talking about Donald Trump and his minions  ….

One should NOT be surprised….

The same Trump who has his OWN Fraud convictions?

The guy who has got RID of those who could/would check the numbers FOR any government report?

 

Since the White House formed a task force in March intended to combat fraud, top administration officials have repeatedly heralded its work, pointing to huge amounts of recovered payments and graft stopped in its tracks.

“We found $250 billion of fraud just since the president made me the fraud czar,” Vice President JD Vance, who leads the task force, said in a speech this month at the Republican midterm convention.

Yet some of the numbers Mr. Vance and his task force have promoted are overstated or lack specificity, and rely on temporary pauses in funding as well as cases and actions that long predated President Trump’s second term, according to a New York Times analysis of documents released by the administration. The task force also appears to be relying on claims of fraud that could not be verified or leaning on allegations of fraud that are being prematurely included.

In August, the White House published a so-called fraud ledgerchronicling its work. It singled out three categories of fraud identified and eliminated since January 2025 — not, as Mr. Vance said, since this March, when the task force was established. As of Wednesday afternoon, the task force asserted it had found, or “uncovered,” $245.7 billion in fraud through data analysis, “stopped” $62.9 billion annually through actions like suspending providers and enacting rule changes, and “enforced” $59.1 billion through indictments, settlements and financial fines.

It is difficult to verify those figures because there is no publicly available breakdown of the total. A senior White House official said the task force chose not to itemize fraud schemes and actions to avoid compromising current law enforcement investigations.

The task force ledger’s chronology and a White House news release from August offer some details about $47 billion of the more than $300 billion the task force asserts it has identified or eliminated. But even that information falls short, leaving unclear how that amount is spread across the three categories.

Undoubtedly, the federal government loses vast amounts of money to fraud: $233 billion to $521 billion annually, equal to about 3 to 7 percent of federal spending, according to one estimate from the Government Accountability Office, an independent, nonpartisan agency that has scrutinized how the government spends taxpayer funds for more than a century.

Mr. Vance and his task force have ferreted out real cases of fraud, and their efforts to draw attention to the problem and recover taxpayer funds are laudable, experts said. But the task force’s unverifiable claims may undermine efforts at transparency and obscure the actual scale of the work it is performing…..

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But given that Mr. Trump fired more than a dozen independent inspectors general (including Mr. Greenblatt) at the beginning of his second term and installed political allies in their place, “there’s no one that can look at those numbers in detail and share with the American people whether they are valid, transparent and that the methodology is sound,” he said….

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The task force’s description of its largest “fraud actions” offers few details about how it arrived at the estimates, making it impossible to verify the reliability of those figures.

Government watchdog agencies must abide by rigorous standards, explain their methodology when compiling reports on improper payments and fraud, and work within a system of checks and balances. For example, if the Government Accountability Office made a recommendation to an agency that estimated a cost savings, the agency had to agree with the estimate; if it did not, the accountability office’s own inspector general had to verify and reconcile the figures,…

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What the administration has described as other instances of anti-fraud victories appear to refer twice to the same actions or cases….

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Fraud cases often span years as investigators gather evidence, prosecutors bring charges, juries deliver convictions and judges issue sentences across different administrations. Many figures the task force has reported take credit for work conducted under previous administrations and local governments….

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Several of the largest numbers the task force reported in its ledger describe actions that have not borne out tangible results, but are merely the first steps in building cases or seeking repayment. Other examples refer to so far temporary withholding of federal funding.

More than a third of the total amount of “fraud enforced” can be attributed to $22.6 billion from the Small Business Administration, which appears to figure prominently in two of the three categories in the ledger. The vast majority of that figure refers to the agency’s announcement in April that it would send 562,000 delinquent pandemic-era loans for debt collection. The loans were previously identified by the Biden administration as potentially fraudulent and totaled $22.2 billion.

Just how much of that amount has been recovered is not known….

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Some have also disputed the notion that a broad freeze on payments can reasonably be counted as fraud that has been prevented. Two officials who managed the Medicaid programs in North Carolina and Indiana recently wrote that withholding funding came with plenty of caveats.

It “does not identify a fraudulent provider,” they said. “It does not prove a false claim. It does not strengthen service documentation, improve provider screening, modernize data systems to better detect fraud or help investigators build cases. It simply disrupts the flow of dollars that pay for health care and that pay to prevent fraud.”…..

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