The Office of Inspector General (OIG) already told CMS that it found massive meaningful use overpayments among its providers -- but maybe they'll take quicker action on it now that the topic has captured the attention of a couple of U.S. Senators.
Regular Part B News readers will recall that in June a random OIG audit of 100 providers' records over three years “identified 14 EPs [eligible professionals] with payments totaling $291,222 that did not meet the meaningful use requirements” — representing “$729,424,395 in incentive payments to EPs who did not meet meaningful use requirements,” said OIG.
In its response CMS generally agreed to work with OIG on remedying the situation, but wasn't totally cooperative -- when OIG called for more random samples of EPs’ documentation supporting their attestations, CMS declared it already had “implemented targeted risk-based audits” and planned to keep them up without major changes. For their part, OIG said those targeted audits "are not capturing errors such as those identified in this report" and hoped CMS would see the light.
This week OIG got an assist from U.S. Sens. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, who on July 12 wrote CMS head Seema Verma a letter saying they had read the report and they were with OIG on this one. "If [CMS] is incapable of fully recovering the money," they wrote, "Congress should know about these limitations." This could reasonably be taken as a threat of investigation.
The Senators requested answers from Verma to five questions, including, "Given the estimated $729,424,395 in inappropriate incentive payments, why has CMS not made greater attempts to recover these funds?"
They added, "We recognize that the earlier agency comments to the Inspector General were written by officials from the last administration, and look forward to working more closely with you in prioritizing the protection of taxpayer dollars."
Translation: We're all Republicans -- if we can't save taxpayers money, what good are we?
The Senators seek a reply by the end of the month.