The House voted to fight federal fraud. Will the Senate follow through?

In a rare bipartisan acknowledgment that Washington’s fraud problem has become unsustainable, the House of Representatives recently passed 11 fraud-fighting bills that strengthen financial oversight, improve transparency and make it easier to identify improper payments and fraud before taxpayer money is lost.

The legislation is now waiting in the Senate.

The stakes extend far beyond another package of good-government reforms. The bills represent Congress’s clearest opportunity in years to address one of the largest and most tolerated financial failures in the federal government.

Federal watchdogs estimate fraud costs taxpayers between $233 billion and $521 billion every year. Let that sink in: At the high end, fraud losses exceed the annual budgets of most federal departments. Yet Washington continues to operate under a model that would get any private-sector executive fired. It sends money out the door first, blindly. It discovers fraud later, then hopes investigators can recover what was stolen, which they rarely do.

The federal government pays benefits, grants, loans, disaster assistance, and other funds. Months or years later, agencies uncover fraud, launch investigations, issue reports, hold hearings, and recover only a fraction of the losses. Then the cycle repeats.

If a Fortune 500 company lost hundreds of billions annually through preventable fraud, shareholders would demand accountability. In Washington, failure has become institutionalized.

The........

© The Hill