Dan Burton: “Mr. Chairman, today we are going to do something that is a little bit unusual for the Congress. We are going to vote on…”

“Mr. Chairman, today we are going to do something that is a little bit unusual for the Congress. We are going to vote on a bill that will save taxpayers' money instead of spending their money. Today we are going to vote on the Government Waste Corrections Act. The Federal Government is one of the biggest consumers and customers in the world. Every year, Federal agencies spend hundreds of billions of dollars buying goods and services, pens, papers, computers, cars, trucks. You name it, and the government buys it. Along the way, mistakes are made. Someone punches in the wrong code, and a vendor gets paid too much, and taxpayers' money gets wasted. Nobody knows exactly how much money gets wasted each year, but we do know this, it is not thousands of dollars, and it is not millions of dollars. The General Accounting Office estimates that billions of dollars are wasted each year in erroneous overpayments. Private sector companies are very aggressive about trying to catch these errors and get their money back. Most Federal agencies do not. My bill would focus agencies on getting back these millions and billions of dollars in overpayments. My bill takes a proven private sector financial management tool called recovery auditing and applies it to the Federal Government.”