Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is rolling out a new program that will pay informants up to 30 percent of fines collected from financial criminals, a move that could put millions of dollars in the hands of tipsters willing to expose the sprawling healthcare fraud draining tens of billions from taxpayers every year.
The program, set to launch Monday alongside a new advisory from the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, marks the latest step in the Trump administration's escalating effort to shut down what confidential Treasury documents describe as one of the largest sources of illicit proceeds in the country.
Individuals in the United States or abroad who provide information leading to a successful enforcement action with monetary penalties exceeding $1 million would be eligible for awards ranging from 10 to 30 percent of the proceeds. The payments come directly from fines, not from taxpayers, as the New York Post reported, citing confidential Treasury documents it obtained.
The scale of the problem explains the urgency. Medicaid and Medicare fraud alone costs an estimated $68.7 billion each year, according to a 2022 study by the Colorado State University Global White Collar Crime Task Force. Last year, the Justice Department brought criminal charges against 324 defendants for alleged participation in $10 billion worth of healthcare fraud.
Those numbers dwarf what most Americans hear about. And until now, the federal government has done little to enlist ordinary citizens in the fight.
FinCEN, the Treasury bureau charged with tracking dirty money, will issue an 18-page advisory on Monday directing lenders to be vigilant in identifying and reporting suspicious transactions potentially related to healthcare fraud schemes. The warning lays out as many as 24 red flags for financial institutions to watch.
Among the indicators: claims logged by someone without permanent residence in the United States, sudden spikes in billing from newly established medical companies, and large transfers to overseas companies immediately after a government direct deposit clears.
A Treasury document set for publication Monday stated plainly that "health care fraud has increased significantly since the COVID-19 pandemic." The same document warned:
"These schemes threaten the integrity of both the US health care and financial systems, impose enormous costs on taxpayers, waste critical resources for beneficiaries of these programs, and increase the cost of health care in the United States."
The advisory also describes how the fraud works on the ground. Kickbacks and bribes flow through recruiters and marketers to complicit doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and other medical professionals, all for fraudulent, nonexistent, or unnecessary medical care.
Under the Bank Secrecy Act, financial institutions must file Suspicious Activity Reports with FinCEN whenever they suspect money laundering or fraud. But investigators found that activity deserving red flags went unreviewed for months or years at some institutions.
Bessent, the 63-year-old former hedge fund manager, visited Minnesota in January. What he found there helped shape this crackdown. The state had become ground zero for fraud schemes in which Somali immigrants allegedly ripped off government welfare programs to the tune of at least $9 billion since 2018.
One scheme alone, involving the nonprofit Feeding Our Future, saw $250 million taken from funds meant to provide food to hungry children. Some of that taxpayer cash was allegedly funneled to al-Shabaab, the Islamist terror network.
A Treasury official briefed on the matter told the Post:
"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."
That single sentence captures the stakes better than any policy memo. American tax dollars, money taken from paychecks to fund healthcare for the elderly and the poor, were allegedly diverted to terrorists and spent on luxury goods. The fact that this continued for years raises hard questions about who was watching and why they weren't.
The Treasury Department is not just going after fraudsters. It is putting financial institutions on notice that failure to police their own transactions carries real consequences.
Just three weeks before the whistleblower program launch, Treasury hit New York-based investment bank Canaccord Genuity with a record $80 million civil fine for failing to monitor suspicious trading. Between 2019 and 2022, investigators said Canaccord failed to file at least 160 suspicious activity reports covering thousands of questionable transactions.
The case involved a Cyprus-based firm that allegedly helped Russian oligarchs move money out of Russia. The fine sent a clear signal: banks that look the other way will pay.
The IRS already runs a similar whistleblower scheme. Bessent's program extends the concept to the broader financial-crimes enforcement apparatus under Treasury's umbrella, creating a new incentive structure for insiders and bystanders alike to come forward.
The whistleblower program and FinCEN advisory do not exist in isolation. President Trump signed an executive order in March 2025 vowing a government-wide zero-tolerance approach to fraud. Vice President JD Vance held the inaugural meeting on Friday of a new anti-fraud task force he is leading.
That sequence, executive order in March, task force launch on Friday, whistleblower program and bank advisory on Monday, suggests a coordinated rollout rather than a one-off announcement. The administration appears to be building an enforcement architecture designed to attack the problem from multiple directions at once: tighter bank surveillance, stronger penalties for institutional negligence, and direct financial incentives for people who know where the fraud is happening.
The approach makes practical sense. Federal investigators cannot be everywhere. The people most likely to spot healthcare billing fraud, fake nonprofits siphoning child-nutrition funds, or suspicious overseas wire transfers are the people closest to the transactions, employees, accountants, compliance officers, and community members who see the money moving.
Paying them a percentage of recovered fines aligns their incentives with the public interest. And because the payments come from fines rather than appropriations, the program costs taxpayers nothing upfront.
Several details about the program remain unclear. The formal name of the whistleblower initiative has not been disclosed. The specific agency that will administer tip submissions and payouts is not yet public. And it is not clear whether the program covers only healthcare and benefits fraud or extends to other categories of financial crime under Treasury's jurisdiction.
What is clear is the gap the program aims to fill. For years, healthcare fraud has grown while enforcement resources stayed flat. The pandemic poured trillions in emergency spending into systems with weak controls, and criminals noticed. The $10 billion in healthcare fraud charges brought last year, the $9 billion allegedly stolen from welfare programs since 2018, the $250 million looted from a child-nutrition fund in Minnesota, these are not rounding errors. They represent a systematic failure of oversight that cost real people real money.
The FinCEN advisory's 24 red flags amount to an admission that banks have not been catching what they should have been catching. Investigators found suspicious activity sitting unreviewed for months or years. That is not a technology problem. It is an accountability problem.
Bessent's program bets that the right financial incentive can turn bystanders into watchdogs. For a tipster who helps the government recover a $10 million fine, the reward could reach $3 million. That is real money, enough to change a life and enough to make a potential whistleblower think twice before staying silent.
For too long, the people stealing from taxpayers faced better odds than the people trying to stop them. If this program works as designed, that math starts to change.
