Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is launching a whistleblower reward program that will pay informants up to 30 percent of fines collected from criminals convicted of healthcare fraud, government benefits theft, and other financial crimes. The program, set to go live Monday, targets a sprawling network of scams that costs American taxpayers tens of billions of dollars every year, and it pays bounties from the penalties imposed on fraudsters, not from public coffers.
Confidential Treasury documents obtained by the New York Post spell out the mechanics. Individuals in the United States or abroad who provide information leading to a successful enforcement action with monetary penalties exceeding $1 million become eligible for awards ranging from 10 to 30 percent of the proceeds. The money comes directly from fines, meaning the program funds itself from the criminals it catches.
The move follows President Trump's March 2025 executive order declaring a government-wide zero-tolerance approach to fraud. Vice President JD Vance held the inaugural meeting of a new anti-fraud task force on Friday, signaling that the White House intends to keep sustained pressure on the problem rather than issue a press release and move on.
Alongside the whistleblower bounties, the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network will issue an advisory Monday directing lenders to be vigilant in identifying and reporting suspicious transactions tied to healthcare fraud schemes. The 18-page Treasury missive raises as many as 24 red flags that financial institutions should watch for when processing transactions.
Banks are already required to file Suspicious Activity Reports under the Bank Secrecy Act whenever they suspect money laundering or fraud. But the new advisory makes clear that Treasury expects more aggressive compliance, a pointed message given the department's recent enforcement track record.
Just three weeks before the program launch, Treasury hit New York-based investment bank Canaccord Genuity with a record $80 million civil fine for failing to monitor suspicious trading. Investigators said the firm failed to file at least 160 suspicious activity reports between 2019 and 2022, covering thousands of questionable transactions. The allegations centered on a Cyprus-based entity that allegedly helped Russian oligarchs move money out of Russia.
That record penalty sends a message to every compliance department in the country: the days of looking the other way carry a price tag. As we previously reported, Bessent's whistleblower reward program represents a significant escalation in how Treasury pursues financial crime.
Bessent visited Minnesota in January, and what he found there appears to have accelerated the administration's timeline. Federal investigators have been probing a web of fraud schemes in the state that the New York Post described as making Minnesota "ground zero" for government benefits theft.
The numbers are staggering. One scam involving the nonprofit Feeding Our Future saw $250 million stolen from funds meant to provide food to children. More broadly, Somali immigrants allegedly defrauded government welfare programs of at least $9 billion since 2018. Federal investigators reported that some of those funds may have reached Al-Shabaab, the Islamist terror network operating in East Africa.
A Treasury official briefed on the matter put it bluntly:
"Our citizens have a right to know that their tax dollars are not being diverted to fund acts of global terror or to fund luxury cars for fraudsters."
The scale of the alleged theft dwarfs most federal fraud cases. Last year alone, the Justice Department brought criminal charges against 324 defendants for alleged participation in $10 billion worth of healthcare fraud. A 2022 study by the Colorado State University Global White Collar Crime Task Force estimated that Medicaid and Medicare fraud costs at least $68.7 billion annually.
That figure, nearly $70 billion a year, represents money taken from programs that serve elderly and low-income Americans. Every dollar stolen is a dollar that doesn't reach a patient, a nursing home, or a rural clinic.
Fox News reported that Bessent framed the bounty in characteristically direct terms during a television appearance. "We are going to offer whistleblower payments to anyone who wants to tell us the who, what, when, where and how this fraud has been done," Bessent said. He added: "We know that these rats will turn on each other."
The confidence behind that statement reflects a simple incentive structure. Criminal enterprises depend on silence. When a tipster can earn hundreds of thousands, or millions, by breaking that silence, the economics of loyalty shift fast. The IRS already runs a similar whistleblower program, and Treasury is now extending the same logic to a far broader range of financial crimes.
The administration has also moved to freeze multiple federal funding streams to Minnesota as part of its response, though a judge temporarily blocked a broader freeze affecting several Democratic-led states, as Breitbart reported. Bessent said Treasury is increasing scrutiny of money-transfer businesses tied to remittances between Minnesota and Somalia as part of the anti-fraud effort.
The broader context of the administration's anti-fraud push, including Trump's recent major announcement, suggests the White House views fraud enforcement as both good policy and good politics, a rare combination that puts opponents in an uncomfortable position.
Treasury's own documents acknowledge a pattern that anyone who followed pandemic-era spending could have predicted. "Health care fraud has increased significantly since the COVID-19 pandemic," the FinCEN advisory states. The flood of emergency spending, trillions of dollars pushed out the door with minimal oversight, created a bonanza for organized fraud rings.
The Treasury missive describes how these schemes operate in practice:
"This is often facilitated by paying kickbacks and bribes through recruiters and marketers to complicit doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and other medical professionals for fraudulent, non-existent, exploitative, or unnecessary medical care."
That passage describes a supply chain of corruption, from the recruiter who finds a willing physician to the pharmacist who fills a fraudulent prescription to the bank that processes the payment without filing a report. The new advisory and whistleblower program attack every link in that chain.
The 18-page document warns that fraud "threatens the integrity of both the US health care and financial systems, imposes enormous costs on taxpayers, wastes critical resources for beneficiaries of these programs, and increases the cost of health care in the United States." That last point deserves emphasis. When Americans wonder why their insurance premiums keep climbing, tens of billions in annual fraud is part of the answer.
Just The News reported that Bessent framed the program as a direct fulfillment of the president's mandate. "As promised, Treasury will reward whistleblowers who provide timely, actionable information on fraud, sanctions violations, and other significant illicit finance activity," Bessent said.
He added a line that connects the Minnesota scandal to the broader policy: "President Trump has been clear that Americans have a right to know that their tax dollars are not being diverted to fund acts of global terror or to fund luxury cars for fraudsters."
The Washington Examiner reported that Treasury proposed a formal FinCEN rule to govern the reward structure, and that Bessent tied the initiative directly to the massive welfare-fraud cases in Minnesota, where federal prosecutors have said Medicaid fraud alone likely cost taxpayers $9 billion. Bessent pledged that "Treasury will continue to find and disrupt fraud schemes wherever they exist."
Newsmax reported that qualifying tipsters may be located in the United States or abroad, broadening the program's reach to anyone with knowledge of fraud against American taxpayers, regardless of geography.
The program's exact eligibility rules, exclusions, and payment procedures have not been fully disclosed. The legal authority establishing the award structure has not been publicly detailed. And while the Minnesota investigations have produced eye-popping numbers, $9 billion in alleged welfare fraud, $250 million stolen from a children's food program, the question of how much money can realistically be recovered remains unanswered.
There is also the matter of whether banks will comply with the new advisory's 24 red flags in a meaningful way or treat it as another compliance checkbox. The Canaccord Genuity fine suggests Treasury is willing to impose serious consequences for failures. Whether that willingness survives the inevitable industry lobbying remains to be seen.
What is not in question is the scale of the problem. Fraud in Medicaid and Medicare alone exceeds $68 billion a year. Organized criminal networks have recruited foreign nationals to exploit federal social programs. Taxpayer money has allegedly flowed to terror organizations. And for years, the federal government's response amounted to sporadic prosecutions and hand-wringing reports.
Bessent's program offers something different: a financial incentive for the people closest to the fraud to help end it. It turns the criminals' own associates into potential witnesses, funded by the criminals' own penalties. That is not a press release. It is a policy with teeth.
When the government finally decides to treat fraud like the theft it is, the right tool is not a task force memo. It's a bounty.
