On May 24, 2012, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General ("OIG") published a report addressing the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' ("CMS") difficulty in collecting $332 million in overpayments between 2007 and early 2009. The report, entitled Obstacles to Collection of Millions in Medicare Overpayments, is the result of  OIG's performance of audits on CMS and contractor operations analyzing efforts to collect $416 million in Medicare overpayments. "As of October 8, 2010, CMS had not collected the majority of overpayment amounts identified in OIG audit reports. Of the 154 OIG audit reports with sustained overpayment amounts totaling $416,287,546, CMS reported collecting $84,168,502." Additionally, the report noted that CMS could not provide verification for the $84 million in overpayments the agency claimed to have collected.

OIG concluded that the collection efforts "were limited because of time constraints imposed by the statute of limitations on overpayment collections. In addition, [CMS] did not provide its contractors with adequate guidance for collecting overpayments and did not have an effective system for monitoring its contractors' collection efforts." OIG recommended that CMS "pursue legislation to extend the statute of limitations so that the recovery period exceeds the reopening period for Medicare payments" and "provide specific guidance to its contractors concerning . . . the timeframe in which the contractor must take action to collect an overpayment . . . [and] the type of documentation that the contractor must maintain to substantiate an overpayment collection." CMS has agreed to "explore the possibility of legislative proposals that would extend the [referenced] statute of limitations." A copy of OIG's report is available here.  Megan Fanale Engel, Mark Faccenda, Peter Leininger