In 2024, the U.S. Government Accountability Office published “reliable estimates of fraud losses affecting the federal government” for the first time in U.S. history. The study “estimated total direct annual financial losses to the government from fraud to be between $233 billion and $521 billion, based on data from fiscal years 2018 through 2022.” Given that there are 132 million households in the U.S., the average annual cost to each U.S. household of fraud in the federal government is about $1,800 to $3,900 per year. Over the average U.S. lifespan of 78 years, this amounts to a cost of $140,000 to $300,000 per household. These figures don’t include federal waste and abuse, state and local government fraud, or federal tax fraud and noncompliance, which amount to another $275,000 per household.