The Treasury Department and the Bureau of the Fiscal Service reported Oct. 6 on fiscal year 2026 results from their fraud and improper payment prevention work. Treasury says its Do Not Pay service now reaches about 99 percent of federal programs, up from about 4 percent at the end of fiscal 2025.
Treasury says it screened more than 2.3 billion records against Do Not Pay data sources, up from 641 million the year before, and added nine datasets, including company registration data and select verification against Social Security's Numident file. It also set up a new payment verification process.
Under that process, Treasury says it screened more than 1.1 billion federal payments totaling about $3.7 trillion. It identified and returned about 13,500 payments worth $175 million. Treasury piloted checks of bank account ownership and of whether Taxpayer Identification Numbers are present and correctly formatted, and says those checks became fully operational on Sept. 30, 2026.
These are Treasury's own figures, and the release does not say how many returned payments were later found to be legitimate or corrected. For people who receive federal payments, the practical point is that a mismatched bank account or tax ID can now cause a payment to be stopped. Keep your bank details and taxpayer ID current with the agency that pays you.