Information Builders, the supplier of business intelligence (BI) and analytics, information integrity and integration solutions, says it is working with numerous public sector customers to reduce the instances and impact of fraud, waste and abuse through realtime data access. As all levels of government continue to suffer the financial repercussions.
Across industries, organisations are required to do more with less, and this is particularly true in the public sector. In addition to prevention challenges posed by budget constraints, many agencies are struggling with disparate environments, lack of information-sharing and outdated technologies reliant upon manual searches.
While organisations are struggling to address these areas, criminals are growing ever more sophisticated, launching new forms of attacks and increasingly complex schemes.
Johan Jurd, MD of InfoBuild, a representative for Information Builders in South Africa, says Information Builders is suited to assist public sector organisations tackle these challenges through flexible, realtime tools for analytics, integration and data integrity.
With this framework, customers can integrate data from a variety of sources, including cloud-based information and social media; quickly spot trends and patterns using geographic analysis; isolate factors that indicate the probability of fraudulent activity; and use predictive models to score values against new claims, clients, and payment requests.
Information Builders’ solutions are also customisable, providing the flexibility necessary for agencies to adapt to ever-evolving regulatory requirements, investigative tactics and emerging fraudulent schemes.
A Social Services department in the US uses Information Builders’ Fraud Detection and Prevention Framework. Nearly one million people receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, representing approximately $1-billion in funding each year.
According to the US Department of Agriculture, however, at least 4% of these funds are fraudulently acquired or sold. The state partnered with Information Builders to reduce this fraudulent activity, drawing on the framework’s mapping capabilities to identify patterns by geographic region.
Because a common occurrence of fraud involves disreputable retailers providing customers with money rather than food, the ability to drill into suspected occurrences by region is particularly beneficial. In addition to the money saved by reducing fraudulent transactions, resources have also been freed up, previously spent on manual research and reporting processes.
