Ramp for Public Sector: because $2.8 trillion in improper payments isn't serving anyone’s mission

Public sector finance teams are entrusted with some of the most consequential spending in the country: the funding behind infrastructure, public safety, education, and healthcare. They operate under constant scrutiny, where every dollar is public record and every misstep can become a headline.

They deserve systems that match that responsibility. Instead, they've been handed a patchwork of legacy tools that enable wasteful spend and bury teams in hours of unnecessary paperwork.

Since 2003, federal agencies have reported an estimated $2.8 trillion in improper payments and $160 billion in 2024 alone. Some of it is fraud. Some of it is error — payments made in the wrong amount, to the wrong recipient, or without documentation to verify them. The root cause is the same: systems built to record spend, not control it.

Consider government purchasing card programs. They were created to provide speed and flexibility. Instead, they've become one of the most consistently cited sources of misuse, compliance failures, and audit findings nationwide.

When Texas auditors reviewed purchasing card controls, their finding was blunt: the internal control structure is "not designed or operating to mitigate significant risks."¹

The pattern shows up across the country:

• Virginia: $5 million in questionable credit card expenditures attributed directly to weak oversight.²
• Washington: Over $2 million misappropriated through P-card schemes, with auditors flagging purchasing cards as a “high-risk misappropriation tool.”³
• New Jersey: Nearly a quarter of sampled transactions lacked required documentation.⁴
• Maryland: Employees split 120-plus transactions to circumvent procurement thresholds.⁵

These aren't isolated failures from mismanagement. They’re failures from the underlying infrastructure.

That's why we built Ramp for Public Sector: To give every government finance team the controls, automation, and compliance (FedRAMP, U.S.-only data residency) to make taxpayer dollars go further.

Existing systems fail finance teams and the communities they serve

In legacy systems, controls exist downstream in reviews, reconciliations, and audits that happen weeks after transactions clear.

"There was no easy way to see, 'Did the supervisor sign off on this?' or 'Where are we in the approval process?' Nor did we have the ability to proactively catch inappropriate spending. It was all very manual and very time-consuming."
—Chase Kinney, Finance Manager, City of Mount Vernon

Budget decisions run on numbers that are already weeks out of date, and finance leaders struggle to anticipate budget shortfalls. When auditors arrive, finance teams are reconstructing months of activity from scattered records.

And fixing these gaps with more procedures and reviewers only exacerbates the problem.

The result? The mission pays the price:

• A P-card meant for EMS supplies gets charged for a personal hotel stay. Without automated controls, it happens again next month. And the month after that.
• Health departments lose staff hours to receipt chasing instead of patient care.
• School districts cancel programs because budget shortfalls surface too late.

1,600+ public sector organizations already make every taxpayer dollar go further with Ramp

In 2025 alone, these 1,600 organizations saved $94 million and recaptured 213,000 hours of administrative time.

Of the $94 million saved, 80% came from automated controls that blocked or recovered spend before it became an auditor’s finding.

In the City of Ketchum, a four-person finance team reclaimed more than 100 hours a month, dropped reconciliation time by 90%, and cut audit prep from days to hours. That's time and money going back to the work that actually serves their community.

Most public sector teams manage cards in one place, expenses in another, invoices somewhere else, and policy in a binder.

Here's what changes when it all runs on one platform:

• Expenses are submitted within 15 seconds, from your phone, with receipts auto-captured, policy auto-checked, and approvals auto-routed.
• Committed spend is visible across funds, departments, and cost centers the moment it happens, not weeks later when the ERP catches up.
• State- or agency-specific procurement rules are set once and enforced system-wide.
• Invoices are captured with 99% accuracy and coded automatically, with overbilling, duplicates, and suspicious vendor changes flagged before money moves.
• Every transaction carries a timestamped audit trail — receipt, coding, approvals, and changes — organized before anyone asks.

FedRAMP-ready and U.S.-only environments now available on Ramp

Ramp for Public Sector introduces two new environments designed specifically for public sector organizations, fully isolated from each other and from the commercial platform:

• One environment for teams that require FedRAMP compliance (running in AWS GovCloud).
• And another for teams that need U.S.-only data residency without the FedRAMP requirement.

New trusted partners help bring Ramp to the public sector

Ramp has also expanded its public sector distribution network to simplify how organizations buy:

• Carahsoft Technology Corp., The Trusted Government IT Solutions Provider®, serves as Ramp’s public sector distributor, making the company’s solutions available to the public cector through Carahsoft’s reseller partners and its National Association of State Procurement Officials (NASPO) contract.
• OMNIA Partners’ cooperative contracts, including Ramp’s direct Region 4 contract, streamline purchasing for eligible public sector entities.
• Velocity1 joins as a value-added reseller supporting regional and state customers.

"Public sector agencies have needed modern spend controls for years. Ramp meets compliance standards, and we're proud to provide a cooperative purchasing pathway that enables agencies to adopt Ramp efficiently, compliantly, and with confidence."
—Allan McCombs, Executive Vice President of Partner Development, OMNIA Partners

Your team deserves systems as strong as their mission

Public sector finance teams didn't sign up to chase receipts, reconcile spreadsheets, or reconstruct audit trails. They signed up to serve their communities: to keep infrastructure running, classrooms funded, and essential services available to the people who depend on them.

The compliance environments are in place. The purchasing pathways are open. The systems that held public sector organizations back are no longer the only option. The hardest part isn't the technology. It's deciding to change.

"Government can get stuck in its own way. This was a classic case where we dared to be different — and with Ramp, we hit a home run. Change is hard, but so is watching your team drown in manual work when better tools exist."
—Brent Davis, Director of Finance, City of Ketchum

→ Read how the City of Ketchum dared to be different

^{1 Internal Audit Division Report, Texas Department of Transportation
2 Richmond P-card audit finds at least $5M in 'questionable' spending, VPM News
3 Purchase cards remain a high-risk misappropriation tool for governments large and small, Office of the Washington State Auditor
4 A Performance Audit of P-Card Practices, State of New Jersey Office of the State Comptroller Audit Division
5 Purchasing Card Program Performance Audit, Prince George’s County, Maryland Office of Audits and Investigations}