Fraud prevention is moving from detection to prevention at the point of payment. Treasury screened $3.7 trillion in federal payments, stopping $175 million in improper disbursements and demonstrating the value of verifying recipients before money moves.

AI is making traditional payment approvals incomplete. The SEC’s warnings about AI-powered impersonation showed that an authorized payment isn’t necessarily a legitimate one, especially when beneficiary details can be manipulated.

The next competitive advantage for CFOs is integrated payment intelligence. Connecting authoritative identity data, beneficiary verification, and fraud controls directly to ERP and payment execution systems could stop fraudulent transactions without slowing legitimate payments.

The most expensive fraud control is becoming the one that works perfectly, just a few seconds too late.

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Two developments from Washington this week, one from the U.S. Treasury Department and the other from the Securities and Exchange Commission, suggest that the next competitive advantage in financial security may come from making it impossible for questionable payments to leave in the first place.

New data from the U.S. Treasury Department’s Fiscal Year 2026 Fraud and Improper Payments Report showed Tuesday (Oct. 6) that the federal agency screened more than 1.1 billion federal payments totaling approximately $3.7 trillion during fiscal 2026, identifying and returning roughly 13,500 payments worth $175 million that would have gone to ineligible individuals, many of them already deceased.

“Treasury continues to transform how the federal government protects taxpayer dollars by using better data, stronger controls, and advanced technology to stop fraud and improper payments before money goes out the door,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a statement.

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