Pennsylvania Treasury auditors stopped about 20,000 state payment requests worth $1.4 billion during the fiscal year that ended June 30, but most of that money was released after agencies corrected errors, according to a new report presented Wednesday.
The distinction matters: the $1.4 billion is not a finding that the commonwealth lost that amount to fraud or waste. Treasury said the reviews produced about $75 million in actual savings by preventing duplicate payments, overpayments, payments to ineligible recipients and other requests that should not have gone out. Correctable problems such as a wrong address, incomplete support or a technical coding error remain “improper” when first submitted even if the underlying bill is legitimate.
The department processed more than 21 million payments totaling about $145 billion in fiscal 2025-26, according to reporting from the Pennsylvania Capital-Star. Treasury performs the review for more than 70 agencies before money leaves state accounts.
That authority comes from Section 1502 of Pennsylvania’s Fiscal Code, which requires Treasury to audit payment requests and approve only those that appear lawful and correct. Rejected requests go back to the originating agency for revision, correction or cancellation.
Treasury’s OpenBookPA improper-payments page explains that auditors review supporting documents, check legal and contractual authority and screen for possible duplicates. Its first public report, covering fiscal 2024-25, documented 18,765 rejected payments worth nearly $820 million and $88.1 million in savings. The new figures show a larger value flagged but a lower amount ultimately avoided, underscoring why the two measures should not be treated as interchangeable.
The latest report attributes the largest shares of flawed requests to the Department of Revenue, at 49.9%, and the Liquor Control Board, at 19.8%. Human Services accounted for 7.3%, the State Employees’ Retirement System 5.9% and Transportation 4%. Those percentages describe where rejected requests originated, not each agency’s share of confirmed losses.
State Sens. Chris Gebhard and Kristen Phillips-Hill said they plan legislation requiring agencies to assess every program not already covered by the federal Payment Integrity Information Act. Under the proposal described Wednesday, agencies would repeat those assessments every two years, publish the results and classify programs as low, moderate or high risk. High-risk programs would also have to calculate error rates and prepare corrective-action plans.
The proposal has not yet completed the legislative process, so its scope and enforcement provisions could change. For now, the practical effect of the Treasury report is greater visibility into an existing checkpoint: agencies submit bills, Treasury identifies defects, and only the portion that cannot be corrected becomes a direct saving. Future annual reports will show whether public agency-by-agency data and repeated reviews reduce both the number of faulty requests and the time needed to fix them year over year.
