The state Department of Health has made $92 million in overpayments and billing errors in administering Medicaid during the past three years, according to state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli.

DiNapoli’s office released a three-part audit on Tuesday identifying a range of problems with how the state’s massive Medicaid program is handled.

“Our audits keep finding that the safeguards designed to detect waste, fraud and abuse have failed over and over again,” DiNapoli said. “The Department of Health has to start protecting the taxpayers’ money and fix the leaks in the Medicaid system.”

DiNapoli criticized the Department of Health for failing to act to recover many of the misspent funds, such as $53 million in what he called improper, duplicative payments to Medicaid recipients. DiNapoli said the department agreed payments had incorrectly been made, but was only acting to recover 5 percent of the funds.

“This is not the time to be wasting tens of millions of taxpayer dollars and doing nothing to recover $50 million,” DiNapoli said. “Multiple [recipient] ID numbers, overpayments, payments for unnecessary services—it just goes on and on.”

Claudia Hutton, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health, noted that the issues DiNapoli identified in the audits make up less than 1 percent of total Medicaid claims. She said the department is committed to preventing improper payments from being made.

“Not all claims are as simple as the comptroller portrays them. Nevertheless, we appreciate the auditors’ efforts to identify improvements,” Hutton said.

Among the issues DiNapoli’s office identified are:

• 25,950 Medicaid recipients who have multiple ID numbers from local social service agencies. The state made separate Medicaid payments under each ID number, meaning providers were receiving too much money. DiNapoli said it is not health department policy to investigate or recover premiums when multiple providers are paid for the same recipient.

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