The Trump administration has acknowledged a major error in figures it used to support a fraud investigation into New York’s Medicaid program, conceding that a key claim by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services significantly overstated the number of recipients of personal-care services in the state, according to an Associated Press report. 

The mistake centered on statements made last month by CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz, who said New York’s Medicaid program provided personal care services to about 5-million people last year. CMS has now said the actual figure was about 450,000, or roughly six percent to seven percent of the state’s 6.8 million Medicaid enrollees, according to the report.

A CMS spokesman told the AP that the agency had misidentified New York’s billing-code practices and had since refined its methodology. 

The error undercuts one of the administration’s public justifications for launching the probe and has raised questions among health policy analysts about the reliability of the administration’s broader anti-fraud campaign, particularly in Democratic-led states, the AP reported. 

CMS spokesman Chris Krepich told the AP that the inquiry remains active and that the agency still has concerns about New York’s oversight of personal care services, including high spending per beneficiary and the size of the state’s personal care workforce. 

New York officials seized on the admission. A spokesperson for Gov. Kathy Hochul told the AP that CMS’s original claim was “patently false,” while the state health department said the administration’s characterization amounted to a targeted attempt to obscure the facts.

The New York investigation is part of a wider federal crackdown on suspected healthcare fraud.

The Trump administration has also moved against California, Florida, Maine, and Minnesota, and that President Donald Trump last month signed an executive order creating an anti-fraud task force across federal benefit programs led by Vice President JD Vance. As part of that effort, Vance announced a temporary halt to $243 million in Medicaid funding for Minnesota, prompting a lawsuit from the state, according to the AP. 

Read more at the Associated Press