We’ve been mulling over the ways the Recovery Act will affect government life and relations after the bulk of the spending is over. That won’t happen for a while (see “If the check is in the mail has the money been spent?”), but we’re starting to see signs of Recovery Act approaches seeping into other government activities, notably in attacking fraud. As Cheryl Arvidson, the assistant director for communications at the Recovery Board, wrote us: “That could have a profound impact on fraud fighting down the road.”

In fact, a few weeks ago, OMB Director Peter Orszag announced  a formal effort to roll out some Recovery Act fraud detection tools to other federal agencies.

The first of the agencies into which OMB wants to transplant Recovery Act ideas is the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Srevices, where a pilot program is in the wings. This is a good place to start as CMS had $65 billion in improper payments in 2009.

From the beginning, Recovery Act leaders and managers have emphasized the need to protect billions of stimulus dollars from misuse and abuse. The Recovery Operations Center, for example, uses open-source records, federal watch lists, news aggregators, and other information to screen Recovery Act contractors. By drawing on millions of public records, making links and generating leads, investigators can go beyond surface information to make sure that contractors who were debarred in the past aren't getting new contracts under different names.

At a federal financial management conference in Washington a few months ago, Doug Hassebrock, the Recovery Board's assistant director for investigations (photo at left), explained that the risk models used by the operation center help to signal where fraud might occur. For example, the operations center found one company that had come up clean in a search of the number the federal government was using to identify it (a so-called DUNS number). You'd think the case would end there. But the operations center found a dozen other DUNS numbers associated with the same organization. All of those had been debarred from federal services because of fraud.

It's premature to say what happens from here. The tools are new and resources for sharing techniques and tools are slim. But the central idea is promising, and takes a leaf from the book of 21st Century health care. Prevention is better than a cure. In other words, it's cost effective to stop fraud and waste before it actually occurs.