“The Department of Veterans Affairs is using cross-departmental collaboration and the application of new technologies to combat fraud, waste, and abuse within its benefits system.
Much of this centers on the burgeoning use of robotic process automation (RPA) capacities and machine learning to assist evaluators in more quickly and accurately detecting instances of benefits misuse. Speaking at the GDIT How AI can Prevent and Detect Fraud, Waste and Abuse forum, VA’s Program Manager of Fraud Prevention Services Erick Zenteno detailed how new practices have allowed the agency to overall improve the management of its benefits system…”
“’One area that was a challenge for us was fragmentation. Operations were siloed across all the Veterans Benefits Administration business lines. So that really was an issue in terms of integrating and centralizing efforts at an enterprise level. In some areas, some of the solutions that we had were good at that time, but were not best in class or did not have the benefit of commercial best practices,’ Zenteno said.
As a means of improving VA’s broader waste and fraud prevention efforts, agency technologists focused on data consolidation as a means of more effectively evaluating potential instances of misuse through a unified process. This digital transformation program also involved using methods with a proven history of efficacy across the private sector…”
“The ultimate outcome has been a facilitated process of using advanced data analytics and machine learning to make fraud and waste detection more accurate — as well as improve the VA’s ability to distinguish human error from intentional benefits misuse. This has allowed VA’s adjudication process to be easier to navigate for both civil servants as well as veterans and veteran families who might make innocuous errors.
‘It’s not all criminal,’ Zenteno said. ‘Human error can be categorized rightly as unintentional errors … sometimes the systems are too complex to navigate and errors happen. So part of the emphasis is to identify that and properly label it in a way that you can address. If something has human error, it doesn’t do us any good to categorize that as fraud because there’s not really fraud, it is just something that can be addressed by different ways.’…” Read the full article here.
Source: Removing Silos to Combat Fraud, Waste in Veteran Benefits – By Adam Patterson, May 11, 2021. GovernmentCIO.
