Bringing Big Data to the Fight Against Government Benefits Fraud, Waste, and Abuse

The U.S. Government spends trillions of dollars on benefits programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid each year. Unfortunately, billions of those dollars are improperly paid, reducing the benefits to those who most rely upon them. In 2016, the White House estimated these losses at $144B.

Improper payments, fraud, and abuse takes many forms, consider some of these examples of Medicaid fraud and abuse:

• Billing for services not rendered
• Altering claims
• Providing unnecessary services
• Submission of false data on claims, such as date of service or provider
• Duplicate billing for same service
• Accepting kickbacks or payments for referrals
• Embezzlement

This is just one example from the healthcare sector. But improper handling of information, especially transactional data or information generated by government services, exposes agencies to risk of fraud, waste, and abuse.

Why Benefits Fraud Analytics is So Hard in Government

The OMB has long been pushing agencies to use more and better data to fight fraud, reduce improper payments, and understand why they’re happening in the first place. This concept of data analytics in government is nothing new. Agencies probably already have the information they need to detect fraud: transaction history, claims, emails, etc. But using this data as a strategic weapon to detect suspicious patterns has become impossible for many agencies.

That’s because traditional BI analytics has made it difficult to get the depth of insight without a lot of intervention from IT. As a result, analytics initiatives become too unwieldy to implement and quickly flounder.

Fortunately, there are new tools, techniques and data to detect fraud.

Tips and Tools for Fighting Benefits Fraud

In a recent webinar (now on-demand), DLT, Tableau and ICF walked through best practices and solutions that agencies can deploy to fight fraud with greater effectiveness. It’s a self-service analytical approach that lets you assemble disparate data, visualize it, reveal patterns, and get to insight quickly.

Watch the webinar and learn how to improve fiscal governance and reduce the risk of fraud, waste and improper payments.

Read more: Find Fraud Quickly – 4 Steps to Data Insight