Protecting Stimulus Funds from Fraud, Waste and Abuse

What is the idea?

Implement an effective business process and proven solution to capture and analyze the allegations that are received across government agencies and the GAO FraudNet from private citizens, contractors, and government workers.

The type of service that is recommended requires both fraud and abuse (functional) and information technology (technical) expertise and a proven web-based solution to:

1.  automate the collection of allegations from multiple hotline sources and formats into one fraud case management system;
2.  analyze the allegations to identify patterns and trends and to determine which cases need to be investigated through the use of sophisticated data mining and business intelligence tools; and
3.  manage not only the operational and technical processes, but the business processes to quickly assemble comprehensive information, review allegations and adjudicate cases.  Allegations can be converted into cases manually or immediately upon entry through a rules-based engine. The workflow capabilities assign cases to investigators for follow-up, provide alerts and notifications and track the audit history.  The entire investigative process can be automated and allows agencies to investigate, create, manage, track and collaborate on cases, including support for criminal, civil and administrative resolutions. Reporting and data matching within a single agency and/or across agencies to evaluate potential fraud and abuse is achieved by managing the data in one or multiple and interoperable data warehouses.

Alerts and notifications (as cited in other ideas) are required to identify early problems and non-obvious relationships and predictive analytics are needed to target and prevent potential fraud, waste and abuse.  It is possible to include many of these requirements into a sophisticated, yet configurable fraud case management system without the delay in building a customized solution.

Why is it important?

Given the unprecedented and enormous size of the Stimulus Funds, the fraud , waste and abusive schemes that will occur are inevitable and real and could potentially cost the federal government and the American people billions of dollars.