The Bureau of Fiscal Service (BFS) is the bureau of the U.S. Department of Treasury that carries out government-wide delinquent debt collection under the Debt Collection Improvement Act (DCIA) of 1996. Among other things, the DCIA authorized Federal disbursing officials to withhold or reduce eligible Federal payments to pay the payee's delinquent debt owed to the United States. In order to implement this section of the DCIA and other debt collection authorities, BFS established the Treasury Offset Program (TOP).
TOP contains a centralized database of delinquent debts, including non-tax debts owed to the United States. TOP matches information about those debts with information about Federal payments that are about to be disbursed. If the name and taxpayer identification number on a payment matches with the name and TIN on a debt, that payment will be offset in whole or in part to collect the delinquent debt. In Advantage Financial, those debts are imported and are eligible for offset against vendor payments in the same way that a state’s own debts are eligible for offset against vendor payments as part of the Automated Disbursements process.