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Treasury tells House committee Do Not Pay needs more data access to stop improper payments

Subcommittee on Government Operations, House Committee on Oversight and Accountability ยท January 6, 2026

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Summary

Treasury witnesses told a House Oversight subcommittee that Do Not Pay can scale pre-payment checks but needs statutory access to key federal datasets (tax IDs, Social Security numbers, death data) and additional modernized inputs to prevent billions in improper payments.

WASHINGTON

Representatives on the House Oversight subcommittee on government operations pressed Treasury officials on gaps in Do Not Pay that they said limit the agency's ability to block improper payments before they occur.

An assistant secretary for accounting policy and financial transparency at the Treasury Department told the panel that Do Not Pay is a government-wide tool used by agencies and states to flag risky payments but that it has been underutilized and lacks statutory authority to query certain federal databases. Treasury said two main obstacles are limited access to authoritative federal datasets and that only a small share of federal programs can access all available Do Not Pay data.

"So we already received the data. We just can't verify it," the official said, describing the common case in which agencies or states hold information but Do Not Pay cannot confirm tax identification numbers or Social Security numbers across siloed systems. Treasury told lawmakers a January tiger team estimated that techniques and new datasets could have prevented about $28 billion in improper payments in a prior year.

Witnesses also discussed specific outcomes from existing Do Not Pay capabilities. Treasury said PARIS matching helped prevent $1.3 billion in duplicate payments last year and that adding death records in November for 19 states identified $156 million in one month.

Treasury told members it supports limited, privacy-protective statutory changes to allow Do Not Pay to validate taxpayer identification numbers and income in a manner consistent with its access controls. Committee members pressed for pilot partnerships with states, incentives for agency modernization, and for Treasury and PRAC to provide additional examples to the committee.

No legislation was enacted at the hearing; members were given time to submit materials for the record and Chair Sessions indicated he plans to introduce bills addressing PRAC and data access.