Tom Carper

On the campaign trail, there was a lot of discussion, as I am sure you will recall, of using technology to make government more efficient, more transparent, and more secure.

We do not oversee contractors well.

I think Canada uses the Internet for its census. I am told so far it has worked fairly well.

I am just going to ask maybe one quick question.

There is an old saying that if you fail to plan, then you should plan to fail.

Let me just interrupt. I just thought that was a great example.

I do not believe that the website gives us the information that we need.

He was Twittering while I was asking questions. He is pretty good.

OK. I understand another person was recently appointed as the Federal Government's first ever Chief Technology Officer.

Some of these ideas can be seen in the new Recovery.gov website that was recently set up and will be tracking stimulus funds down to the local level.

I think too often we try to take our programs and build up to a number, not really having an expectation that the number may be so large that the process will not get us where we need to go.

I think there is a necessity to try to align the agency and the work that you all do with the law.

Let us make sure FEMA has not put limitations on itself that the law did not intend.

We are going to run out of money in the Medicare Trust Fund.

I think there is a real opportunity here for us and for the IG and CMS to say, here is what a compliance program looks like at a managed care entity.

I am especially interested to see if the first State that ratified the Constitution, might be on that list.

I think the key for us in looking at these contractors is--I have difficulties with the bounty issue once again

The demonstration project has been seen by many, including by me, as a real success

What can we do at the Congressional level, this Subcommittee, this Committee, the Senate, the House, to address some of those vulnerabilities?

If we amend our law so that it allows some portion of the recoveries to be used to strengthen those kinds of systems, does that make sense?

We need to find ways to have them actually come forward and tell us they found a problem.

If we change our audit plan and look at the most vulnerable but also the most problematic, we are going to end up eating that on the State budget side.

I think one of the things we did in Sarbanes-Oxley is literally the CEO of the company, when a company verifies or certifies that they have scrubbed their books, they have done the right thing. The CEO has to sign his or her name on the…

I don't believe they are allowed to keep a portion of the recoveries to pay for their recovery activities.

Senator Coburn and I worked on changes to the Improper Payments Act.