Policy & Practice | Fall 2026

raud, waste, and abuse in public benefit programs have become a growing focus of legislators and the public in recent years, and child care subsidy programs are no exception. Headlines in 2025 about improper payments, federal audits, and alle gations of fraud prompted policymakers and administrators to ask an important question: How can states strengthen program integrity without creating new barriers or burdens for families and providers? The question carries significant weight. Through the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) alone, the federal government distributes approximately $11.5 billion annually to help low-income families access child care and to support quality improvement efforts nationwide. 1 For many agencies, the instinctive response is to focus on enforce ment—more audits, more investigations, and more oversight. Those tools are certainly important. But as state leaders across the country are discovering, enforcement alone is not enough. The most effective way to prevent improper payments is to address the underlying condi tions that allow them to occur in the first place. Fighting Fraud Through System Design What Wyoming’s Experience Reveals About the Future of Child Care Program Integrity F By Carrie Gray

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