The U.S. Treasury Department has identified and returned approximately 13,500 federal payments totaling $175 million that otherwise would have gone to deceased individuals, marking a major expansion of the federal government’s effort to prevent fraud and improper payments before taxpayer money is disbursed.

The effort fulfills a requirement of an executive order signed by President Donald Trump in March 2025 aimed at strengthening protections against fraud, waste and abuse. Treasury expanded its Do Not Pay program, which allows federal agencies to use government and commercial data to verify the identity and eligibility of payment recipients.

Over the past year, Treasury screened more than 1.1 billion federal payments worth approximately $3.7 trillion. The department also added nine new data sources to Do Not Pay, increasing the amount of information available for screening by roughly 20 times compared with the previous system.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the department is shifting away from a traditional “pay and chase” approach, in which improper payments are recovered after the fact, toward preventing questionable payments before they leave the government.

“In the past year alone, Treasury built and deployed new safeguards that verified more than $3.7 trillion in federal payments,” Bessent said. He added that access to Do Not Pay had expanded from 4% of federal programs to approximately 99%.

The expanded system includes additional sources such as corporate registration information from OpenCorporates and verification against Social Security data. Treasury also piloted new safeguards during fiscal year 2026 to verify bank account ownership and taxpayer identification numbers associated with federal payments.

Those verification capabilities were completed at the end of September, allowing Treasury to identify payments that failed established requirements and return them before the funds were disbursed.

Treasury said most of the remaining federal programs are expected to complete onboarding to the expanded system during fiscal year 2027. Officials also said access to Do Not Pay information remains subject to privacy, security, and user-access controls.