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U.S.: Defining the Role of Technology in Fighting Waste, Fraud, Abuse |
| Source: |
fcw.com |
| Source Date: |
Thursday, September 06, 2012 |
| Focus: |
ICT for MDGs
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| Country: |
United States |
| Created: |
Sep 11, 2012 |
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Technology may help agencies stem the tide of waste, fraud and abuse, but sometimes new tools just aren’t enough, according to some experts.
“Technology in terms of transparency is there, and we need to use it,” said Earl Devaney, former chairman of the Recovery Board. “Quite frankly, some of the ideas floating around now that I read about poolside don’t talk a lot about transparency – it’s almost like the word has gone away. [There’s] a lot of talk around technology to cure the accountability piece, but the transparency piece has been sort of missing.”
Newer technologies such as cloud computing, mobile devices and geospatial services have brought new meaning to transparency, Devaney noted at a Sept. 6 breakfast briefing titled “The Watchful Eye: Preventing Waste, Fraud and Abuse,” organized by FedInsider. Data can be quickly displayed and quality controlled, as seen with Recovery.gov, he said. The website created what he said were unparalleled levels of transparency, with technology that allowed citizens to add their zip codes to drill down to their own neighborhoods and see where their tax dollars went, he said.
The Treasury Department’s Do Not Pay List -- a centralized repository that pulls data from five different sources -- was created in response to the 2010 presidential memorandum that directed agencies to enhance payment accuracy. The Do Not Pay Business Center within Treasury’s Bureau of the Public Debt was created a year later as part of the same initiative to prevent, reduce and stop improper payments, as well as identify and mitigate fraud, waste and abuse.
The center's goal over the next 18 months is to expand the number of federal agencies using Do Not Pay, from 17 to 24, said Tom Vannoy, Do Not Pay program manager at the Bureau of the Public Debt. “That’s not a stretch by any means over the next 12 to 18 months, but a goal we feel we can meet fairly shortly,” he said.
Vannoy’s office is also looking to increase the data sources available on the Do Not Pay online portal, which underwent a makeover in June 2012 to provide new features such as batch matching and continuous monitoring. The idea is to go from eight data sources to 14, and add high value to the greatest number of users, Vannoy said.
Continuous monitoring “adds a twist on the batch-matching process,” he said. For example, one agency regularly sends its list of beneficiaries or pension recipients to the Do Not Pay Business Center, which then matches the information against the various data sources to determine whether an individual is deceased. Depending on the information from the data sources, a payment can then either be stopped or continued.
“We’re trying to get that [information] in front of all the newspaper stories that come out regularly where we’ve been paying someone for 25 years because the son or the daughter accessed the account and kept the money coming and never reported it,” Vannoy said.
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U.S.: Defining the Role of Technology in Fighting Waste, Fraud, Abuse Technology may help agencies stem the tide of waste fraud and abuse but sometimes new tools just aren’t enough according to some experts
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