HHS announced Thursday it will increase its use of artificial intelligence to monitor how states and other federal health care recipients are auditing their programs. The move is aimed at reducing the risk of fraud and saving the government money.
Gustav Chiarello, assistant finance secretary who is leading the new program, said the department will use ChatGPT and other AI tools to continually analyze audit reports from all 50 states.
“This is classic big government: everyone requests an audit, the results are unfair, and no one does anything,” Chiarello said in an interview. “Here, we can use AI to drill down into that.”
The move builds on the department’s adoption of generative AI to examine state Medicaid programs, automate administrative tasks and edit text. AI tools can be a powerful help in finding patterns and problems across large documents, but critics say they should be used cautiously by governments because they frequently make mistakes and can introduce unintended bias.
In recent months, the Trump administration and Vice President J.D. Vance’s Fraud Task Force have been pushing ahead with efforts to crack down on fraud in areas such as the Medicaid and Medicare programs and student loan applications. Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson said recently that these efforts include using AI technology to warn of potential fraud. fox news.
States, local governments, nonprofit organizations, and institutions of higher education that spend at least $1 million in federal funds annually must submit an annual audit. The new effort will use AI to analyze audits of HHS-funded programs, including state Medicaid programs and federal grants for research and addiction services, Chiarello said.
Recipients who do not submit required reports or resolve issues with reports may face loss of money.
Critics have blasted the administration’s anti-fraud efforts, noting that most of them target Democratic states, sometimes reflecting a tendency to attack first and gather facts later. At least once, the government admitted that: Associated Press Alleged there were significant errors in the data used to justify New York’s Medicaid fraud investigation.
Asked about safeguards against mistakes made by AI tools, Chiarello noted that the agency evaluates public reports rather than revealing new information. He said these tools are intended to make grantees better stewards of federal funds.
Rob Wiseman, co-director of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, said he doesn’t think the administration is seriously concerned about fraud and doesn’t trust the administration to use AI tools in a fair and bipartisan manner.
“AI, in some ways, misses the mark when you assess what its purpose actually is, rather than what it pretends to be,” he says.
HHS announced it has sent letters to governors and treasurers of all 50 states alerting them to the new initiative. This program was first reported by wall street journal.
“This letter serves as a formal notification that HHS will no longer treat chronic audit noncompliance, recurring deficiencies, material weaknesses, or delinquent audit obligations as issues that may remain unresolved through indefinite informal follow-up.” AP.
Chiarello said he is reaching out to officials from other federal departments in hopes of following his lead.
“It would be fairly easy for other government agencies to take advantage of our technology and jump on it,” he said.
