When Congress authorized over $5 trillion in pandemic-era relief programs, and directed agencies to prioritize speed above all else, fraudsters cashed in with bogus claims.

But data from these pandemic-era relief programs is now being used to train artificial intelligence-powered tools meant to detect fraud before payments go out.

The Pandemic Response Accountability Committee has developed an AI-enabled “fraud prevention engine,” trained on over 5 million applications for pandemic-era relief programs, that can review 20,000 applications for federal funds per second, and can flag anomalies in the data before payment.

The PRAC’s executive director, Ken Dieffenbach, told members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Tuesday that, had the fraud prevention engine been available at the onset of the pandemic, it would have flagged “at least tens of billions of dollars” in fraudulent claims.

Dieffenbach said that the PRAC’s data analytics capabilities can serve as an “early warning system” when organized, transnational criminals target federal benefits programs. He said the PRAC is working with agency inspectors general on ways to prevent fraud in programs funded by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, as well as track fraudsters targeting multiple agencies.

“Fraudsters rarely target just one government program. They exploit vulnerabilities wherever they exist,” Dieffenbach said.

The PRAC’s analytics systems have recovered over $500 million in taxpayer funds. Created at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the PRAC oversaw over $5 trillion in relief spending.  It was scheduled to disband last year, but the One Big Beautiful Bill Act reauthorized the PRAC through 2034.

Government Operations Subcommittee Chairman Pete Sessions (R-Texas) said the PRAC has developed data analytics capabilities that can comb through billions of records, and that these tools need a “permanent” home once the PRAC disbands.

“A permanent solution that maintains the analytic capacities and capabilities that have been built over the past six years is necessary and needed. Its database is billions of records deep, and it has begun to pay for itself,” Sessions said.

In one pandemic fraud case, the PRAC identified a scheme where 100 applicants filed 450 applications across 24 states, and obtained $2.6 million in pandemic loans. Dieffenbach said there are tens of thousands of cases like it.

“This is but one example where the proactive use of data and technology could have prevented or aided in the early detection of a scheme, mitigated the need for a resource-intensive investigation and prosecution, and helped ensure taxpayer dollars went to the intended recipients and not the fraudsters,” Dieffenbach said.

In 2024, the Government Accountability Office estimated that the federal government loses $233 to $521 billion in fraud every year.

Sterling Thomas, GAO’s chief scientist, said AI tools are showing promise in flagging fraud, but he warned that “rapid deployment without thoughtful design has already led to unintended outcomes.”

“In data science, we often say garbage in, garbage out. Nowhere is that more true than with AI and machine learning. If we start trying to identify fraud and improper payments with flawed data, we’re going to get poor results,” Thomas said.

The Treasury Department often serves as the last line of defense against fraud, but it is giving agencies access to more of its data to flag potential fraud before issuing payments.

Under a March executive order, President Donald Trump directed the Treasury Department to share its own fraud prevention database, Do Not Pay, with other agencies to the “greatest extent permitted by law.”

Renata Miskell, the deputy assistant secretary for accounting policy and financial transparency at the Treasury Department’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service, told lawmakers that only 4% of federal programs could access all of Do Not Pay’s data in fiscal 2014. But by the end of this fiscal year, she said all federal programs are on track to fully utilize Do Not Pay.

“We want every program — and there’s thousands of federal programs —  to use Do Not Pay before making award and eligibility determinations,” Miskell said.

To make Do Not Pay a more effective tool against fraud, Miskell said Treasury is looking for the ability to “ping” other authoritative federal databases, such as the taxpayer identification numbers (TINs) issued by the IRS or Social Security numbers, before issuing a payment. Without those datasets, she said, Treasury is following a “trust but verify” approach to payments, doing some basic checks before federal funds go out.

“These data sources would dramatically improve eligibility determination and fraud prevention,” Miskell said.

The post Pandemic watchdog builds AI fraud prevention ‘engine’ trained on millions of COVID program claims first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Office of Personnel Management is addressing what have become growing concerns in Congress over the significant delays in federal retirement processing this year.

In a letter sent Tuesday to a group of House Democrats, OPM Director Scott Kupor touted the benefits of the new online retirement application (ORA) in helping to streamline processing, while at the same time arguing that outdated systems — not staffing levels — are to blame for the current challenges HR employees are facing.

“The main issues with federal HR, we have found, are not low staffing levels, but inefficient and outdated technology and antiquated, cumbersome regulations and processes,” Kupor wrote in the Dec. 30 letter, obtained by Federal News Network. “OPM under the Trump administration has done in a matter of months what the government failed to do for multiple generations: modernize the paper-based federal retirement system.”

Kupor’s comments are a response to a Dec. 22 letter from Democrats on the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which raised concerns about the significant delays retiring federal employees are currently experiencing. Those delays are largely due to a surge of retirement applications from employees who opted into the deferred resignation program (DRP) earlier this year.

Now two months after thousands of federal employees separated from government on Sept. 30, some retirees have told Federal News Network they are still awaiting any retirement-related payments. Some also expressed frustrations about limited information from their agencies on the status of their applications.

In light of the challenges, a group of Democratic lawmakers last week pressed OPM for more details on retirement processing, and how OPM is helping other agencies manage the high volumes of applications. The Democrats’ letter criticized the DRP-inflicted surge of retirements as a “foreseeable and avoidable administrative failure.”

Kupor, in response, pushed back against the lawmakers’ criticisms that the DRP was not a truly voluntary program for federal employees. He also said OPM is “rapidly fixing” the manual, paper-based processes involved in federal retirement — namely through the launch of the ORA earlier this year. Over the last few months, Kupor said ORA helped expedite the retirement process at agencies where applications had been stalled.

“For example, just recently we were able to fast track 1,500 ORA applications that had been backlogged in the HR department of an executive branch agency to bypass the HR organization and transmit the applications electronically to payroll and then to OPM,” Kupor wrote. “These applications had been sitting for months — and were likely to be sitting for months longer; ORA enabled us to address this challenge.”

This year, OPM has also managed to improve its ability to provide interim annuities to more retirees immediately after their applications reach OPM, according to Kupor.

“This is a massive benefit to our retirees that we designed specifically to address the significant volume of applications we anticipated receiving in the wake of DRP,” Kupor wrote.

Rep. James Walkinshaw (D-Va.), who led the Democrats’ letter to OPM last week, said he appreciated Kupor’s response to their concerns, but added that “the facts remain and are stubborn.”

“First, the Trump administration fired or drove out hundreds of thousands of qualified civil servants. Now they’re facing a historic backlog of retirement applications managed by understaffed HR departments in the midst of a rocky rollout of a new IT system,” Walkinshaw said in a statement to Federal News Network. “I very much hope that Mr. Kupor can succeed in ensuring timely processing of federal retirement applications. But right now, he is failing.”

Due to the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce the federal workforce, HR staffing decreased by about 5%, with agencies losing a cumulative total of about 2,600 employees, according to fiscal 2025 data. That does not include HR employees who took the DRP offer themselves and separated after September.

Despite the reductions, Kupor said federal HR is “hardly understaffed,” and that the main challenge is not with workforce size, but rather with outdated systems. With fully digital retirement applications in the ORA, he said processing times become much faster.

“As of today, ORA applications are being completed in approximately 40 days, compared with 90 days for paper-based applications,” Kupor wrote. “I am fully confident that this 40-day time period will continue to be reduced as we are able to get the payroll providers fully integrated into the new system.”

Kupor said OPM has also been meeting regularly with agency HR offices, payroll providers and the CHCO Council to “provide information about digitalization of the retirement process and offer support on an ongoing basis.”

“Any delays that annuitants are experiencing from HR-related activities should be directed toward these individual agencies,” he added.

Many retiring federal employees have told Federal News Network their applications are stuck in the earlier steps of the retirement process, with progress lagging in their agency HR offices and payroll providers. Some employees who retired in September said their applications have not yet made it to the later part of the process at OPM, where annuity finalization occurs.

Federal retirement experts have also said more issues appear to be occurring in individual agency HR offices, rather than at OPM — but that both entities are seeing delays. At the IRS, for instance, several retirees told Federal News Network they are still awaiting payments, or any information on the status of their retirement applications, and that phone calls to the HR office often go unanswered.

“It’s all dead ends,” one retiring IRS employee, speaking anonymously for fear of retaliation, told Federal News Network. “As a government employee, and after all the service that I gave, this is how we’re getting treated. People are sitting here with nothing because of the decisions they made. We can’t afford it.”

Still, Kupor pointed again to significant progress with the rollout of ORA earlier this year. The government’s major payroll providers — the National Finance Center (NFC), Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS) and Interior Business Center (IBC) — have been onboarded to the new platform. Additionally, all CFO Act agencies, aside from the State Department, are currently using ORA, according to Kupor.

Smaller payroll providers including those at the General Services Administration and Postal Service are in an “interim adoption status,” Kupor said. OPM expects those providers to be fully onboarded to ORA in early 2026.

The largest remaining challenge with retirement processing delays, according to Kupor, is payroll providers who have not managed to fully automate their processes.

“We will be prevented from full automation until they free up the required resources to integrate with ORA,” Kupor wrote. “This integration will enable us to receive employee payroll information electronically, which will vastly accelerate processing times.”

The post OPM touts digitization efforts, blames outdated tech for retirement delays first appeared on Federal News Network.

House Democrats are pressing the Office of Personnel Management for answers on how the agency is addressing abnormally high volumes of federal retirement applications that are inundating the government’s processing systems.

In a letter sent Monday, a group of lawmakers raised concerns about the delays retiring federal employees are currently experiencing, amid a major retirement influx spurred by the Trump administration’s deferred resignation program (DRP).

“This foreseeable and avoidable administrative failure is the clear result of an administration that has prioritized a purge of the federal civil service over government efficiency, leaving thousands of federal employees in administrative and financial limbo,” the lawmakers wrote in the Dec. 22 letter, obtained by Federal News Network.

The letter from Democrats, led by Rep. James Walkinshaw (D-Va.), comes in direct response to reporting last week from Federal News Network, which showed that many retiring federal employees are facing significant delays on their applications, while being left in limbo with limited information from their agencies. Some are still waiting for their retirement payments to kick in, months after officially separating from government.

“This surge of applications caused by the administration’s policies has now overwhelmed agency HR offices and payroll providers before many cases even reach OPM, a bottleneck the administration should have anticipated and planned for if it were serious about efficiency,” the Democrats wrote.

The lawmakers, who are all members of House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, called for OPM Director Scott Kupor to explain how OPM has been handling the retirement surge, and how it has been working with agencies who are facing delays of their own in processing retirement applications.

The committee Democrats are giving Kupor until Jan. 29 to detail how OPM has been helping agencies manage the processing challenges, how OPM plans to assess the impacts of HR staffing reductions, and how the application surge has affected customer service. The letter also calls for detailed data on how many agencies and payroll providers have been onboarded onto OPM’s new retirement platform.

“Federal employees, who devoted decades to careers in public service and provided valuable, non-political expertise to federal agencies now find themselves trapped in a prolonged cycle of delayed payments and benefits, lost paperwork, limited communication, and financial and administrative uncertainty,” the lawmakers wrote.

McLaurine Pinover, a spokeswoman for OPM, told Federal News Network that the agency “is aware of the longstanding challenges in the federal retirement system, which predate this administration.”

“That is why we are working diligently to modernize and digitize the retirement process, while prioritizing interim pay so retirees continue to receive income without disruption,” Pinover said.

Earlier this year, OPM launched a new platform, called the online retirement application (ORA), as a way to modernize the government’s paper-based retirement processing system. Agency officials have said the new ORA platform has been crucial over the past several months for managing the unusually high volumes of applications — something that would have been “extremely difficult” in the legacy system. In November, OPM reported that about one-third of incoming retirement applications were digital, and two-thirds were paper-based.

Although the lawmakers said OPM’s modernization efforts are “necessary,” they argued that the ORA is “insufficient” in addressing the immediate-term challenges of lower HR staffing, coupled with larger retirement volumes driven by the Trump administration’s DRP.

“As a result, retiring employees are often unable to reach already overburdened HR staff to correct errors, confirm receipt of paperwork or obtain basic status updates,” the lawmakers wrote. “This further compounds delays and administrative failures across the retirement process.”

Currently, OPM is far above its typical retirement workload due to the DRP, and seeing slower processing times as a result. In October and November combined, OPM took in nearly 44,000 retirement applications from agencies — more than triple the volume OPM saw at that time in 2024. The time it takes for OPM to process an application and finalize a retiree’s annuity has also continued to increase for most of 2025.

Along with OPM, agencies are also seeing slowdowns in their HR processing work, as they are required to review retiring employees’ applications before forwarding them to OPM.

A second wave of federal retirement applications is also expected imminently — something that will further flood the government’s processing systems in the coming months.

The post House Democrats question OPM on retirement processing delays first appeared on Federal News Network.