Watch out: Medicaid claims may face greater scrutiny in the coming year. Are you hanging on to a Medicaid overpayment and maintaining it as a credit balance? The OIG may want to chat with you in 2012. The HHS Office of Inspector General (OIG) has some big plans next year for reviewing your Medicaid claims, and they span the whole spectrum of issues, according to the OIG's 2012 Work Plan, released on Oct. 5. Get to know these hot buttons before you press them with the following information on where the OIG will be focusing its efforts next year. Calculate Those Overpayments When you receive an overpayment from Medicaid, you are expected to send it back--the amount of time you can spend before you refund the money varies from state to state, but if you are aware of an overpayment, you must pay it back. And the OIG is looking for practices that haven't been holding up their end of that deal. "We will review patient accounts of providers to determine whether there are Medicaid overpayments in the accounts with credit balances," the Work Plan indicates. "Previous OIG work found Medicaid overpayments in patients' accounts with credit balances. Medicaid is the payer of last resort and providers are able to identify and refund overpayments received." Translation: OIG Cracks Down on CCI Edits Expect your Medicaid program to be more diligent than ever about denying claims based on National Correct Coding Initiative (NCCI) edits. The OIG's 2012 Work Plan identifies this as an area it intends to scrutinize in the coming year. "Federal law requires states to incorporate compatible methodologies of the NCCI for Medicaid claims filed on or after Oct. 1, 2012," the document notes. "States were permitted to deactivate some or all NCCI edits because of conflicts with state laws, regulations, administrative rules, payment policies, and/or the states' levels of operational readiness. As of April 1, 2011, lack of operational readiness was no longer a permissible basis for deactivation of the edits." Translation: To read the complete OIG Work Plan, visit http://go.usa.gov/93X.