I understand how it happened but irrespective of the "how" it was wildly illegal for it to occur and be maintained this way for decades through both Democrat and Republican Administrations.
However, the federal government could be losing between $233 billion and $521 billion annually to fraud. Additionally, federal agencies reported an estimated $236 billion in improper payments in FY 2023, and cumulative federal improper payment estimates have totaled about $2.7 trillion since FY 2003.
The "best number" is a guess with more than a 2:1 range?
No "audit" would be considered acceptable and no firm could have a presence on a US stock exchange with that sort of report. Its risible that such is considered worthy of publication without immediate arrests of everyone involved.
Let me remind readers that all payments must result from an appropriation by Congress in one form or another. Any payment that is made against an expired program is fraudulent by definition since there is no spending authority that exists for that payment at all, and all of that responsibility falls directly on Treasury because as an Executive department Treasury has the legal responsibility to pay only lawful and proper vouchers. A payment request put into the system without a defined and appropriated program with an appropriated amount against which it is charged is per-se illegal and theft from the government by the receiving party.
Since the appropriated amount for such a program that has expired is zero one must then ask where the tie-back to the appropriated amounts in the ledger are for everything else that Treasury processes. Do we know if those amounts paid are more or less than the appropriated amounts, and once again any in excess of appropriation is again illegal and again theft from the government by the recipient.
This is not a new problem: In 2016 the Senate Committee on the Budget identified $310 billion spent on expired programs -- every penny of which was spent illegally and every penny of which that was received was factually stolen as the legal authorization for said programs did not exist. Again explain how Treasury managed to do this without the General Ledger being out of balance because every credit has an exactly-equal debit and vice-versa in said ledger and there is no program on the other side with an appropriation tied to it so where did the countervailing entry go? It appears that Treasury deliberately ignores today and has been ignoring the fact that programs has defined terms and when they expire the authorization to spend money on them expires too until and unless Congress renews them.
At the core you can trace this to intentional neglect and malfeasance within the Government's information infrastructure. Back to the 1960s and 70s much data was stored on magtape -- a serial media that cannot support referential checks (e.g. "is this SSN in the master death file?") because there's no way to do that in real time. You can do it on a comparative basis but it requires a run through the entire data system with comparison and then a re-write to a second storage device -- and that's verrrry slow.
But once random access storage became available (and remember, the Federal Government has more money than God) and particularly when referential integrity showed up in commercial and even free database systems that excuse instantly evaporated.
Except.... within the government, and only in the government, it didn't.
Nobody on either side of the aisle did the conversion to a "modern" data environment and cleaned up all the bad records. Now perhaps those were, at the time, actually just accumulated dross over the space of decades but the fact is that all of them are points of attack for intentional fraud and the people in the government are ones with access to it and thus can funnel it to those who would commit said frauds!
May I point out that in the mid 1990s I converted MCSNet's data systems to Postgres, a free software product that had referential integrity and the SQL language? Yes, I had to go through the existing data in the previous database during that process and get rid of the dross because it was not possible for the import to succeed otherwise.
Did I find fraud in that process? No. But I did find (and excise) dross.
Here we are thirty years later and you wish to make excuses for the Federal Government not having said referential integrity in their money-handling systems? A system where, by law and accounting standard, every credit must have an exactly equal debit yet that is not actually enforced and in 2016 the Senate Budget Committee identified $310 billion that was illegally spent because the programs were EXPIRED and, had referential integrity been enforced the payments could not have been entered as attempting to code a payment against said program would have failed at the point of voucher entry.
That's not a mistake and by the way it wasn't "2 or 3%" either; just among expired programs it was eight percent, approximately, as the Federal Government at the time was ~3.8 trillion and every single penny of that was, from a legal perspective, STOLEN.
That report came out nearly a decade ago and Treasury did not fix it. That's intentional.
Now you must add to that how much more in actual fraud within programs that were authorized to get the actual amount stolen.
Do not kid yourself that this is a "small thing" either; Treasury did not actually require the offsetting Congressional Appropriation field to be filled in and the total of such "blank" payments was nearly $8 trillion thus far identified. Without that field filled in while you do know who the payment went to you have no means to enforce the limit of Congressional appropriation since to enforce that and refuse to pay beyond the appropriation you must know what appropriation each payment is applied against and which satisfies the other side of the G/L where that obligation rests and which it is counted against.
In other words there are no spending limits without this and Treasury deliberately allowed that to occur! Exactly how much was spent beyond appropriated limits, every penny of which is by definition fraud, is not yet known but that there was no mechanism to prevent is now known. That was not an accident and it extends back for more than two decades without any legitimate excuse.
Further today we find that twenty percent of the "active" Social Security numbers are in fact zombies in that there are 20% more active SSNs out there than there are people in the United States. While I'm very sure that nowhere near all of them are being used for fraudulent purpose every single one of them with actual activity in the form of one or more checks going out against them also constitutes stolen funds to the last penny by definition.
And that's just one program -- albeit a very large one.
This is not accidental and it is in fact felonious on the part of every Treasury employee and all of the last several Treasury Secretaries, never mind every entity and person who put a voucher into the system or took a paycheck as an employee of an expired program or any voucher without the coding to identify and track against explicit Congressional appropriation, each and every one of whom have a legal duty to take "due care" that the laws are faithfully executed.
A SINGLE DOLLAR spent in excess of Congress' appropriation is a criminal felony.
Now people wish to scream when anyone who had their fingers in that bull**** is told to either cooperate in full and cut that **** out or get the **** out? If you're in that camp **** you, **** your spouse, **** your children and **** everyone who you're grifting for because EVERY DAMNED PENNY of that over the last several DECADES was and is theft, fraud AND everyone involved should be fed to feral hogs simply because I refuse to pay for the prison cells they deserve to inhabit until their carcass ROTS.