ALBANY - New York's Medicaid program squandered $92 million in overpayments, billing errors and waste, three scathing state audits have found.

Taxpayers picked up the tab for nearly $200,000 in cab fares for one mother to visit her hospitalized son - and for 26,000 double-dipping recipients and 10 overpaid hospitals - that ballooned bills to Medicaid.

"This is not the time to be wasting tens of millions of taxpayer dollars," state Controller Thomas DiNapoli said.

"Our audits keep finding that the safeguards designed to detect waste, fraud and abuse have failed over and over again. The Health Department needs to step up, needs to do more to prevent fraud."

- One audit found that Medicaid paid $300 per day, five days a week for a Poughkeepsie mother to take a taxi to Albany to visit her son in a long-term care facility.

The total travel costs for her visits hit taxpayers for $196,000 for services deemed not medically necessary. All told, auditors found more than $357,000 in inappropriate transportation payments in the program.

The audit also stopped $20.3 million in Medicaid overpayments for 1,351 claims, including one where a reimbursement rate was changed from $151.51 to $15,151.28 because of a typing mistake.

- A second audit found the state Health Department made more than $53 million in improper payments for nearly 26,000 recipients - including 18,500 in the city - who had multiple Medicaid identification numbers.

The city Human Resources Administration did not use software that would have caught dual enrollments. Instead, HRA simply checked for city eligibility requirements, the audit found.

- The third audit found that 10 hospitals got higher reimbursement rates by claiming they had discharged patients who really were transferred to other facilities.

Westchester Medical Centerwas paid $253,000 instead of the $92,000 it was entitled to by improperly reporting that an accident victim treated for 18 days was discharged, not transferred.