Lankford bill gives fraud protection to federal retirees

Federal retirement benefits, unlike Social Security and veterans benefits, don’t have legislation in place to protect against fraud.

A bill sponsored by Sens. James Lankford (R-Okla.) and Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) aims to correct that.

Lankford, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs subcommittee on Regulatory Affairs and Federal Management, told In Depth with Francis Rose his bill would impose clear penalties against financial caretakers who defraud a federal retiree.

“Right now, the rules are not clear on clear and firm and consistent. If someone starts, in that condition, stealing money from a federal employee, from their retirement, as a caretaker, we want to make sure there are clear consequences,” Lankford said.

Representative Payee Fraud Prevention Act of 2015 covers both CSRS and FERS retirees.

“We tried to make it broad enough and clear enough to put a protection around retired federal employees to make sure that someone is paying attention on the legal side,” he said. “That, hopefully, will create a barrier that someone will think twice before they try and defraud a federal employee in retirement.”

Lankford said the issue, while not a hot-button topic, was brought to his attention by federal retiree advocate groups. Meanwhile, he has targeting OPM retirement wait times.

The average federal retiree waits six to eight months before first receiving their benefits.

However, Lankford said OPM’s data breach has drawn the agency’s attention away from retiree issues, even though talks on reforms took place before the breach. He shared his concerns on the issue to Acting OPM Director Beth Cobert during her first week on the job.

“I said ‘I don’t want you to take your eye your off the ball. This is an ongoing process.’ Yes, we have to deal with the cyber issues, but this is an issue that affects millions of our federal employees. … We can’t just spend all our effort on the cyber issues,” he said.

OPM, Lankford said, is in the process of cleaning through systems and addressing legacy hardware issues.

“This issue is not completely a legacy hardware, old computers issue. It’s also the systems of verification,” Lankford said, pushing two-step authentication for OPM’s systems.

The bill passed the Senate in August, but awaits action from the House.

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