The Beginning of the End of Self-Attestation
Here is a strange fact about how the United States government works: it already knows, in most cases, whether you qualify for the benefit you’re applying for.
It has your tax records.
It has your wage data.
It has your employer information.
It knows if you’re dead.
It knows if you’re in prison.
But it asks you anyway, and it doesn’t check to see if you’re telling the truth. And for the most part, it’s statutorily banned from using the data it has to do so.
For sixty years, the system has operated on a trust-first architecture. A recently introduced bill, the Pre-Payment Fraud Prevention and Treasury Data Access Act, H.R. 8463, is historically significant because it explicitly acknowledges that the federal government can no longer afford to administer major programs this way.
The bill cleared the House Oversight Committee in late April by a vote of 35 to 1, a margin that reflects either genuine bipartisan consensus on the problem, or the fact that voting against pre-payment fraud prevention is a difficult position to defend in an election year. Either way, it represents an important, though small, step in the urgently needed direction of ending the era of self-attestation.
Why Self-Attestation Became the Default
When the major federal benefit programs were designed, mostly in the 1960s and 1970s, the government had no practical alternative to self-attestation. There was no national identity infrastructure and data lived in paper files distributed across thousands of county offices. Connecting records across agencies or levels of government required bureaucratic effort that could take weeks, which was not an option when serving vulnerable people who relied on the money they got from the government to live. The technology to run real-time eligibility checks simply did not yet exist.
Federalism compounded the problem. Many programs were administered by states, counties, and nonprofits operating under their own legal frameworks and the federal government couldn’t easily mandate that a county welfare office in rural Alabama access a database maintained in Washington. Each layer of delegation created another hurdle to clear.
Privacy concerns shaped the architecture as well. Congress deliberately limited data sharing across programs to prevent the creation of a surveillance state. The Privacy Act of 1974 encoded that caution into law. And the caution was warranted. Centralized government data systems had been used to target political opponents, surveil minority communities, and build dossiers on American citizens. Keeping data siloed reflected hard-won lessons about government power and its abuse.
The result was a system in which self-attestation was a feature, not a bug. Applicants provided information, agencies accepted much of it at face value, and verification was deferred or delegated to auditors who arrived long after payments were made.
That approach was generally workable when fraud was localized, small-scale, and committed by individuals acting alone. That era is over.
Today’s fraud environment is industrialized. Organized criminal networks use stolen identities, synthetic identities, AI-generated documents, and automated application systems to attack government programs at scale. The government increasingly faces adversaries that can submit thousands of fraudulent applications before a human employee reviews a single one.
The debate surrounding H.R. 8463 is therefore larger than the bill itself.
The legislation would require agencies to conduct more robust pre-payment verification and expand Treasury’s ability to support fraud detection through the Do Not Pay system. Supporters see the bill as a modernization effort that helps agencies identify problematic payments before money leaves the Treasury. Critics worry about privacy implications and the growing consolidation of government data. Both perspectives are understandable, but neither fully captures what makes this legislation noteworthy.
For those of us in the government fraud prevention space, the real significance of this bill is philosophical. It means that Congress is beginning to move away from a model in which government asks citizens questions and largely relies on their answers and is instead cautiously moving toward a model in which government verifies eligibility using authoritative data before payments are made. In practice, that represents a profound shift.
For years, anti-fraud efforts have largely followed a “pay and chase” model. Agencies issue payments, inspectors general investigate suspicious cases, law enforcement pursues perpetrators, and recovery efforts attempt to reclaim a fraction of what was lost. Policymakers regularly celebrate indictments and convictions while treating fraud prevention as a secondary concern.
The pandemic exposed the weakness of this approach with unmistakable clarity. By the time investigators identify a fraudulent claim, the money has often already been moved through multiple accounts, converted into assets, and wired offshore. Every major pandemic fraud program demonstrated that post-payment oversight is necessary, but not sufficient. Pre-payment verification is where the real leverage exists, and that’s why H.R. 8463 matters.
What a Real Verification Architecture Looks Like
The bill also reveals how reluctant policymakers remain to embrace the full implications of the pandemic lesson. The most immediate gap is income verification. Treasury already holds an enormous amount of data about Americans’ financial lives through tax filings, wage records, and information returns. Yet agencies administering benefit programs routinely cannot access that information to verify eligibility. The result is a system in which the IRS knows a claimant’s income and the benefits agency has to take the claimant’s word for it.
Fixing that requires Congress to authorize Treasury to make income and employment verification data available to agencies conducting pre-payment eligibility checks, with appropriate privacy protections, audit trails, and limits on secondary use.
Beyond income, a coherent eligibility-verification architecture would connect agencies to authoritative records on death, incarceration, business registration, and prior program participation. Federal and state governments already maintain this data, but they don’t have the legal authority and technical infrastructure to use it in a coordinated way before payments go out.
The most revealing aspect of the debate over H.R. 8463 are the provisions that never made it into the final legislative package. The introduced version of H.R. 8463 explicitly referenced both the National Directory of New Hires (NDNH) and additional IRS data authorities including income verification. However, during committee consideration, the NDNH provisions became one of the most controversial elements because of privacy and data-sharing concerns and it was removed from the bill, along with IRS income data.
Even after pandemic fraud, Feeding Our Future, and billions in annual improper payments, Congress remains hesitant to give Treasury access to some of the government’s most powerful verification datasets. Reasonable people can disagree about where those boundaries should be drawn. Privacy matters. Civil liberties matter. But taxpayers should also recognize the tradeoff being made.
Every restriction on pre-payment verification increases reliance on self-attestation, and every payment that relies on self-attestation increases vulnerability to fraud. Those vulnerabilities have produced trillions of dollars in losses over the last decade and the future losses will only be more extreme.
Policymakers need to decide whether government should continue treating verification as an exception or finally make it the foundation of program administration. H.R. 8463 acknowledges that the status quo is no longer sustainable, but it is a baby step.
H.R. 8463 is one of eight related bills that moved through committee together. The package also includes H.R. 8464, the Stopping Fraudulent Payments Act, which aims to prevent agencies from making payments when elevated fraud risk has been determined. This is another vital piece of legislation that gives Treasury the tools and authorities it needs to protect taxpayer money, but the bill did not get the bipartisan consensus to move out of committee.
There is more at stake than money here. When public programs are systematically exploited, when hundreds of millions of dollars meant for hungry children end up wired to foreign bank accounts, public confidence is undermined. The taxpayers begin to question, rightly, whether benefits reach the people they were designed to serve, and whether the government can be good stewards of their money.
Program integrity is the mechanism by which government earns the right to ask citizens to fund collective programs in the first place.
What Congress is attempting is a renovation, one that requires new plumbing, new wiring, and a structural inspection of every room in the house. What comes next—income verification, cross-program data sharing, real-time analytics, legal authority to pause suspicious payments—is the harder work. H.R. 8463 knocks down one wall. The house has sixty years of deferred maintenance left to address.
Photo by Vikram Singh on Unsplash. Article first posted on GovIntegrity.