Improper Payments Elimination And Recovery Act Of 2009

Floor Speech

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Mr. ISSA. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, this is an important and bipartisan bill being brought to the floor today. It has been well thought out and well crafted, and I want to thank Mr. Murphy and Mr. Bilbray for their diligent work on this subject, also Mr. TODD PLATTS, who has worked in this area for a number of years and has brought to light this failure of government.

Mr. Speaker, when there are $2 trillion worth of payments being made and $100 billion worth of improper payments being noted, one would say we must be doing a good job of finding improper payments that would allow us to get to the bottom of this large amount of money. But, Mr. Speaker, without this corrective action, it is clear that what we are seeing is the tip of a very large iceberg.

Under the current law, since you must have the greater of both $10 million and 2.5 percent in order to trigger reporting, this only really triggers $10 million events with very small agencies. As we look at the Department of Defense and other large agencies, realistically the 2.5 percent becomes the trigger. If I were able to, with a stroke of a pen, change things from day one, I would look and say the American people consider not only $10 million a lot of money, but $2 million and $1 million, $100,000.

We cannot quickly make those kinds of changes in reporting, I am told. However, today we are taking a fairly significant step. By automatically having anytime when $100 million is at stake be reported and by reducing from 2.5 to 1.5 percent the program outlays, we are catching an unknown amount of greater waste, fraud, and abuse in government. These improper payments will undoubtedly rise, perhaps double, perhaps triple in reporting as a result of this new law, but it is not enough. As this reporting becomes more widespread and we're able to investigate extremely large but smaller than today programs, I hope that we will see that we must find all, all, improper payments in government and set them right. The American people expect no less.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. ISSA. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, in closing, I'd like to share with you something that happened this morning. I was on C-SPAN and a woman named Betty called in and was very concerned that we were not working on a bipartisan basis; that there was no consensus or compromise; that we were paralyzed. It's sometimes hard to answer somebody on the other end of a telephone line, but I would like to today take note that this is an example of the dozens of times every week that we come together, the chairman and myself, members of the committee, and we find things we can agree on that are good for America, the common good, and they will not usually be noted.

So today I would hope that we all note that--and for Betty who called in this morning--that in fact this is an example where we can find compromise. We can find a win-win for the American people. I would hope that we would do more of it. Chairman Towns has been good at looking for those examples, and I pledge to be better at looking for opportunities like this. I'd like to, lastly, thank Leader Hoyer and Leader Boehner for the help they gave us in expediting this to the floor.

With that, Mr. Speaker, I urge support and passage of the bill and yield back the balance of my time.

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