Scott Perry Presses Witness About Efforts To Combat ‘Fraud In FEMA Dollars’

2 days ago

During a House Transportation Committee hearing on Tuesday, Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) questioned witnesses about fighting fraud within the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

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Transcript

00:00Thanking all the members or the witnesses for their testimony. We will now turn to questions

00:04for the panel and the chair recognizes himself for the first round of questions. I'm going to

00:11start with you, Ms. Lauder. I read through a bunch of what you submitted. I'll admit I didn't read

00:17through every single bit of it. It's voluminous emails and correspondence and as the county

00:23manager, I'm not sure, maybe you never thought about the mission of FEMA, but it's to coordinate

00:29between the federal agencies and of course state and local agencies, but it was never designed

00:35to be the command and control and do all the work, right? But that's kind of what's expected of it

00:40now. And it seems to me as the person that's trying to figure that out, you know, in the

00:48aftermath of this devastating disaster, like you don't have time to figure that out. You're just

00:54trying to deliver, right? I remember the two times we were flooded out of our home. One time we stayed

00:59in the fire hall before we moved to a neighbor's house that wasn't affected and somebody we didn't

01:06even know just offered to come take us in. And then the other time was at the township building

01:12and I'm thinking about it, but it seems to me as I read through your

01:17correspondence here, much of your county didn't even exist, right? There wasn't any,

01:23there might not have been a township building, a fire hall or a neighbor's house to go to.

01:28And so I'm just wondering from your experience, I mean, you couldn't get answers even about a

01:34federally owned property for which to place temporary housing and you couldn't get any

01:39answers on that, let alone the housing. If you were going to give everybody here,

01:44which I think are very interested in trying to figure out how to make this work,

01:49what would be the one message, you know, as a person who has lived through it and experienced

01:56and been frustrated by it and seeing people like you, like you described,

02:01living in trailers filled with mold and having no prospect whatsoever of anything changing anytime

02:09soon, what would be the one message regarding what FEMA, how it would be different in your

02:14eyes if it were going to work? At local government, we were looking for resources.

02:22We needed assistance and what we could not find were how to leverage those resources.

02:27The resources that we were offered, like TSA, were very clearly not suited for my community.

02:32And so I think the message that I would have is that number one, communication.

02:37If there's resources being offered, we need to understand what those terms are up front so that

02:41we can even evaluate whether or not they're going to be effective in a community. The second is

02:45there has to be some responsiveness. Whenever we identified issues, whenever we identified

02:51resources like the federal property, we had to follow up on that ourselves. We were living a

02:57disaster in our own lives. We were living a disaster with our community, and yet we were

03:02having to follow up repeatedly in order to try to get any progress or any answers or even find out

03:09if our requests were being heard anywhere. I submitted that property no less than four times

03:14in four different ways, and still when I got on a call in November to ask about housing,

03:21they pulled up a database and none of those requests managed to get into the database.

03:25I think the two messages are that the communication structures have to be robust.

03:30They need to happen before the disaster so that we know who even to call. We also need to know

03:36up front how to use these resources or make those resources more flexible so that whenever we

03:40identify what the needs are and how that's going to play out in our community, we can use them.

03:45Do you have any indication at this point why it took so long for FEMA to even show up? Right after

03:53this happened, obviously everybody knows what's happened, but it took days and days, and then I

03:57think it's my understanding when they finally did show up, they were headquarters like 90 miles away,

04:01which is a fair drive, right, especially in bad conditions. Do you have any indication now what

04:06took them so long? I have never been given a reason. I can hypothesize. I think the fact that

04:12we are on the edge of the disaster was part of it. It's hard to get through the mountains. You don't

04:17get places very easily. The only other thing I can imagine is that our numbers like for a TSA did not

04:23look like they were high, which could indicate on a data front point that we didn't need help,

04:28but they weren't high because it wasn't an applicable solution for Transylvania County.

04:32Okay, I got a lot of questions and a little bit of time here for each one of you. Mr. Guthrie,

04:37you perfected, I think, or at least owned a fraud prevention program in your state. Can you briefly

04:45outline how that might be applicable to FEMA because there is a huge amount of fraud in the

04:49FEMA dollars that are spent, and we'd obviously like that not to be the case. Thank you, Chairman

04:55Perry, for that question. In Florida, we knew that there was the propensity to have fraud,

05:01waste, and abuse. What we did, starting about two years ago, is we built a program that we want to

05:08get good structured data into our system. That helps us get good structured data, and it allows

05:13us to utilize large language modeling, machine learning, and to a certain point, some generative

05:18AI to predict when we may have a duplicate payment, or the payment doesn't actually

05:24check the box for the contract. In other words, a vendor has charged us more than what they should

05:29have. Again, it focuses from a standpoint of getting the good structured data into the system,

05:35and then we use machine learning on the back side to do that. We are detecting, just in the

05:39recent months, we had three situations for about $600,000 that we flagged for potential fraud,

05:45waste, or abuse. Then we put eyes on that to then investigate it and correct the anomalies that were

05:51in the invoices, and it was just that. It was an anomaly in the invoices where we were charged

05:56a different rate when we should have been charged a lower rate, but it did end up saving taxpayer

06:00dollars. Just in the last three months, $600,000. I appreciate the response.

Scott Perry Presses Witness About Efforts To Combat ‘Fraud In FEMA Dollars’

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