Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is rolling out a program that will pay Americans up to 30 percent of the fines collected from financial criminals, turning everyday tipsters into paid fraud hunters as the administration escalates its war on billions in stolen taxpayer dollars.
The program, launching Monday, targets a sprawling ecosystem of health care fraud, government benefits theft, and money laundering that has bled federal programs dry for years. Confidential Treasury documents obtained by the New York Post spell out the terms: when a tip leads to a successful enforcement action producing fines above $1 million, the tipster collects between 10 and 30 percent of the proceeds.
The money comes from fines, not from taxpayers. That detail alone separates this from the usual Washington promise of accountability that costs the public twice.
Fraud in Medicaid and Medicare tops an estimated $70 billion a year. A 2022 study by the Colorado State University Global White Collar Crime Task Force pegged the annual cost at $68.7 billion. Those aren't rounding errors. They represent real money siphoned from programs meant to serve the elderly, the disabled, and low-income families, and redirected to criminals.
Bessent, a 63-year-old former hedge fund mogul, visited Minnesota in January. That state has become ground zero for one of the most brazen fraud scandals in recent memory: investigators allege that Somali immigrants ripped off government welfare programs to the tune of at least $9 billion since 2018.
One Minnesota scam alone, run through a group called Feeding Our Future, bilked $250 million from funds meant to provide food to hungry kids. The scheme exploited pandemic-era federal nutrition programs, and its sheer scale stunned even veteran fraud investigators.
That scandal fits a broader pattern of fraud accelerating since COVID-19. The Treasury advisory states bluntly that "health care fraud has increased significantly since the COVID-19 pandemic." The pandemic opened the spigots on federal spending, and criminals rushed in.
The administration has made clear it views the problem as systemic, not episodic. President Trump signed an executive order in March 2025 vowing a "government-wide zero-tolerance approach" to fraud, a directive that called out Minnesota leaders as complicit in the failures that let these schemes flourish.
Vice President JD Vance held the inaugural meeting of a new anti-fraud task force he leads on Friday. The task force represents the enforcement arm of that executive order, bringing together agencies that for years operated in silos while fraudsters operated freely across state lines and program boundaries.
That Vance was tapped to lead the effort signals the White House treats fraud not as a back-office compliance issue but as a political priority.
Alongside the whistleblower program, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network will issue an 18-page advisory Monday telling lenders "to be vigilant in identifying and reporting suspicious transactions potentially related to healthcare fraud schemes." Financial institutions must file a Suspicious Activity Report under the Bank Secrecy Act whenever they suspect money laundering or fraud.
The advisory raises as many as 24 "red flags" for banks to watch. It describes how fraud networks operate: identity theft, bogus claims, shell companies, wire and cryptocurrency laundering, upcoding of medical services, and kickbacks funneled through recruiters and marketers.
A Treasury official briefed on the matter put it plainly:
"Our citizens have a right to know that their tax dollars are not being diverted to fund acts of global terror or to fund luxury cars for fraudsters."
The advisory details how the corruption spreads through the medical system itself. Kickbacks and bribes flow "through recruiters and marketers to complicit doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and other medical professionals for fraudulent, non-existent, exploitative, or unnecessary medical care," the Treasury document states.
That language matters. It names the enablers, licensed professionals who lend their credentials to criminal enterprises for a cut of the take. Without them, the fraud machine stalls.
The Treasury has already shown it means business. Just three weeks ago, it hit New York-based investment bank Canaccord Genuity with a record $80 million civil fine. Investigators said the bank failed to file at least 160 suspicious activity reports between 2019 and 2022. Activity that deserved "red flags" went unreviewed for months or years.
The Canaccord case involved allegations that a Cyprus-based firm helped Russian oligarchs move money out of Russia. It stands as a warning to financial institutions that looking the other way carries real costs.
The Justice Department's own recent track record underscores the scale of the problem. Last year, it brought criminal charges against 324 defendants for alleged participation in a $10 billion health care fraud scheme as part of an operation dubbed Gold Rush. That case involved a Russian-banked crime syndicate.
The breadth of fraud touching federal programs has also drawn scrutiny to the immigration system. Federal agencies have found staggering rates of fraud in investigated immigration cases, a problem that compounds when benefits-eligible populations expand faster than enforcement capacity.
The new Treasury program mirrors a similar IRS scheme that has produced results. The IRS whistleblower program famously paid Bradley Birkenfeld a record $104 million after he helped authorities collect hundreds of millions in taxes tied to money hidden at Swiss bank UBS, as Reuters reported. Lawyers representing whistleblowers noted a surge in inquiries and higher-quality documentation after that payout.
Senator Charles Grassley warned at the time that the IRS needed to move quickly to capitalize on the momentum. "Otherwise, the momentum from the IRS's new policy and procedures and Mr. Birkenfeld's award will be lost, to taxpayers' detriment," Grassley said.
The lesson is straightforward. When you pay people for actionable intelligence, you get more of it. And when the payment comes from fines levied on the criminals themselves, the taxpayer wins twice, once from the enforcement action, once from the deterrent effect.
The Treasury documents lay out the stakes in plain terms:
"These schemes threaten the integrity of both the US health care and financial systems, impose enormous costs on taxpayers, waste critical resources for beneficiaries of these programs, and increase the cost of health care in the United States."
For years, the incentive structure in federal benefits programs tilted toward fraud. Spending surged, oversight lagged, and the penalties for getting caught were mild compared to the profits. COVID-era emergency spending made it worse by loosening verification requirements in the name of speed.
Bessent's program flips part of that equation. It creates a financial incentive for insiders, employees, contractors, accountants, anyone with knowledge, to come forward. A 30 percent cut of a multimillion-dollar fine is life-changing money. It is also a fraction of what the government recovers.
The 24 red flags in the FinCEN advisory give banks a concrete checklist. The SAR filing requirement gives the government a paper trail. And the whistleblower payouts give individuals a reason to pick up the phone.
None of this guarantees results. Programs are only as good as the people who run them and the prosecutors who follow through. But the architecture is sound: reward cooperation, punish negligence, and make the cost of fraud higher than the profit.
Taxpayers have been footing the bill for a $70-billion-a-year fraud habit. It's about time someone started making the fraudsters pay, and paying the people brave enough to turn them in.
