Bayyinah al-Mizan: An Audit of the Audit -- Reproducibility, Coverage, and Tamper-Evidence in Federal Improper-Payment Reporting

This application note performs a structural-honesty verification of the U.S. federal government's own public measurement of improper payments, rather than re-detecting payments. Working entirely from public data (PaymentAccuracy.gov, GAO, Treasury, CBO), it independently reproduces the government-wide rate series and the FY2025 agency rollup, and surfaces a reconciliation gap of about $14.3 billion (roughly 7.7 percent) between the agency-level rollup implied total ($171.7 billion) and GAO's headline FY2025 figure ($186 billion), reported as a finding rather than resolved. Every Tier-1 figure is reproducible from a frozen, hash-verified snapshot via a companion package; the coverage ratio is disclosed as method-sensitive to the net-interest basis (CBO 74.79 percent, Treasury 74.07 percent). The paper explicitly refuses to impute a true improper-payment total, to assert recoverable savings, or to accuse any agency. Companion data set can be found at: https://zenodo.org/records/21452977