Disbursing

Treasury provides central payment services to the American public on behalf of government agencies. Our vision for the future of federal financial management includes creating a seamless end-to-end process for disbursements that is all electronic: from the initiating transaction through settlement: more efficient, faster, and secure. Our goals include:

17 CFO Act agencies using Invoice Processing Platform with $45B of invoices processed by 2021.
Reduce the number of paper checks printed by Treasury to 50M by 2021
95% of federal payments are Treasury-disbursed by 2021

In FY2019, we disbursed 1.2 billion payments totaling more than $3.7 trillion, 100% on time, with 96.5% disbursed electronically. We disbursed 87.3% of all federal payments, including IRS tax refunds, Social Security Administration and Supplemental Security benefits, OPM retirement benefits, veterans benefits, and vendor payments.

Agency Operations:

These are the activities that agencies engage in in order to accomplish their mission. Some of these activities include payroll, travel, issuing grants and contracts.

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Issuing Payments:

These are the activities related to paying recipients the funding based on what was promised during agency operations. Some examples of this is payee setup and outlaying of funds.

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Payment Reporting:

These are the activities related to reporting how agencies spent their funding. Some examples of reporting include GTAS, DATA Act, Consolidated financial statements.

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Auditing Payments:

These are the activities related to determining if agencies made payments in accordance to applicable laws. Some examples are the Prompt Payment Act, Improper Payments Elimination and Recovery Improvement Act of 2012 (Do Not Pay) and Management's Responsibility for Internal Control (OMB A-123).

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The principal objectives of control of disbursements are to ensure that all disbursements are legal, proper, and correct and that all disbursements are accurately recorded, reported, and reconciled in a timely, efficient manner. Each agency’s system of internal management control, and related procedures for, disbursements should be based on the operating needs of that particular agency and should conform to the Department of the Treasury’s (Treasury’s) regulations and the related principles and standards for internal management control prescribed by the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board (FASAB).

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Disbursing

Agency Operations:

Issuing Payments:

Payment Reporting:

Auditing Payments:

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