On August 25, 2026, the Department of Housing and Urban Development Office of Inspector General (HUD OIG), announced a partnership with the Department of Justice (DOJ) through the launch of the National Fraud Detection Center (NFDC).
The NFDC is a prosecutor-led, multi-agency effort intended to strengthen coordination among federal law enforcement, offices of inspector general and state partners in detecting and dismantling fraud schemes targeting taxpayer-funded programs. HUD OIG’s stated purpose in joining the NFDC is to combat fraud schemes impacting federal housing programs.
According to DOJ, the NFDC is designed to close a long-standing gap in “cross-program visibility” that has allowed bad actors to draw on multiple federal funding streams without being detected by any single agency. A core objective is to give participating agencies shared visibility into fraud patterns that cut across multiple federal programs, rather than leaving each program or agency to investigate in isolation.
In addition to HUD OIG, the NFDC’s inaugural members include FinCEN and the Treasury Department, the Small Business Administration, and state-level partners, including the secretaries of state of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio, and South Carolina, the state treasurers of Florida, Mississippi, Ohio, and South Carolina, and the South Carolina Department of Social Services.
The launch fits within the current administration’s broader push to reduce what it has characterized as fraud, waste and abuse in federal spending. In its announcement, DOJ tied the center’s work to the president’s Task Force to Eliminate Fraud and to DOJ’s own Fraud Division, which DOJ announced this past April.