So as state legislators in Frankfort continue their work.

On the last day of the session at the state Capitol, Kentucky State Auditor was in the U.S.

Capitol testifying before a congressional panel.

Allison Ball was one of the witnesses at a hearing called by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, chaired by Republican Congressman James Comer of Kentucky.

The focus of today's hearing fraud and state run federal programs like Medicaid, Snap, and unemployment insurance.

Ball told committee members that a state government audit by her office for the 2025 fiscal year revealed more than $1 billion in waste, fraud and abuse and that a majority of it involved Kentucky's Medicaid program.

This exam revealed that Kentucky paid $836 million to managed care organizations for the same Medicaid beneficiaries, whose coverage was also being paid for by another state.

To be clear, this is definitively waste because one state's payment to an MCO covers all health care of all Medicaid recipients.

So when two or more states are paying, MCO is the same person, only the MCO not the Medicaid recipient benefits.

But that's not all we found in conducting the last three audits required by the Single Audit Act, we have revealed a plethora of problems that show Kentucky is a target rich environment for waste, fraud, and abuse in the executive branch.

These problems include dead people remaining on Kentucky Medicaid, multiple people using the same Social Security number to obtain Medicaid, and eligible non-citizens receiving Medicaid benefits.

We found that on this $836 million of waste that we discovered, because when we started doing interviews with boots on the ground and then with leadership, we found out that people that were actually doing the work were told, hey, this is not that big of a deal.

It's low priority.

If you get to checking somebody's residency, you know, that's good, but it's really not that big of a deal.

So it really did expose that the attitude at the top really does make a difference.

I think that's why it's really important today that we're here, because you are indicating to all the American people, hey, this really matters.

And that has a cultural response and a cultural change.

So I would say the culture is important.

I also think that we need to be reviewing things at all levels.

So as we've started to get more aggressive on reviewing the error rates, those error rates have begun to go down.

We saw that with Snap, we went from 9.1% to 3.5% error rates just because we were actually involved in the process, and we were identifying particular errors.

Or having a database where you.

Ordered the ball, was asked if she thought using biometric information like a fingerprint as proof of identity would help cut down on fraud.

Ball said a secure, reliable identification process would be helpful, but believes it's better to focus on record keeping and responding immediately to red flags.

I will say for us, in our experience, it's not always proven that somebody is who they say they are.

That's the problem.

It's other kinds of breakdowns.

Some my focus has been on problems of, well, we know this person is dead, but they're still listed as eligible and issues like that.

So, so I would say you are correct.

That is part of the problem.

But but my focus has been on a lot of other problems, duplicative payments for one person.

Issues like that.

And I would say those may be the greater issues of concern right now, rather than someone pretending to be somebody that they aren't.

According to the U.S.

Government Accountability Office, in 2024, the U.S.

government lost between 233 billion and 521 billion to fraud.