I was talking earlier today about how to reduce the amount of overpayments--we call them improper payments--the Federal Government makes. Last year they added up to almost $100 billion, not counting the Department of Defense, not counting…

I rise today with my colleague Senator Bennett to introduce an important and bipartisan piece of legislation that will help protect American's from identity and financial theft. As you may have heard in the news, in 2009 Heartland Payment…

we are spending about $460 billion this year, and the amount of waste that has been identified ranges anywhere from $36 billion to, I think, $60 billion.

If we do not have a timeline, if we do not have a date that we are trying to get something done... then these kinds of things just stretch out forever.

Goals have to really reflect both qualitative and quantitative pieces.

There is real money to be saved here. We have a Medicare Trust Fund that has somewhere between--I do not know--10, 15 years of life left in it, and we need every dollar--it needs every dollar that we can save.

I think we need to set some goals here, and I think we need to set some timelines.

We are be ready to take on additional work with the Medicaid and the Part D plans absolutely quickly.

OK, thank. Ms. Benko.

This might be an obvious question, but are there some simple things that we could do to really perform checks on the identifiers?

We must get after it.

If 2 weeks goes by and you do not hear any questions, you are free and clear.

I think your audit has pointed out an area that Medicare needs to pay a lot more attention to.

there is a huge upside there in reducing fraud.

It appears to me that roughly one out of every seven or eight dollars that is being spent in Medicare is being spent wastefully or fraudulently.

I would say at least half of that should be able to be recovered.

We value the work that you and your colleagues do for our country.

A minimum threshold should be, in rolling it out to the rest of the country, should be to achieve what was achieved during that program.

Several reports outside of the government's reports estimated Medicare and Medicaid fraud at $80 to $100 billion.

I think it would be difficult given the current state of Federal procurement time frames.

All right. Thank you.

Everything I do I know I can do better.

I suspect that this is not all fraudulent or improper payments, but my guess is some of it might be.

My father used to say that the work expands to fill the amount of time we allocate to do a particular job.

the welcome mat is always out for you.