How government agencies can shift gears from fraud investigation to fraud prevention

For government workers who investigate fraud, the idea of identifying and stopping an illicit actor after a prolonged investigation is satisfying, but its not as good as preventing the fraud from happening in the first place.

Indeed, according to Thomson Reuters’ Government Fraud, Waste and Abuse Survey most work is focused on fraud detection and investigations, while only a portion works on fraud prevention. For many government fraud investigators, there just isn't enough time to get ahead of things.

Certainly, fraud prevention is a more efficient and effective way to safeguard the public trust. However, shifting from catching fraud, waste, and abuse after it’s happened, to preventing it beforehand isn’t an easy transition. Yet, there are ways that state and local agencies can prevent fraud, either by implementing new solutions or by utilizing the tools they already have in new ways.

Here are four ways that state and local agencies can shift to prevent fraud, waste, and abuse:

1. Implement a case management solution

Just over half of the state and local government fraud investigators surveyed said they are confident that they have the tools needed to address investigative issues; however, almost 70% reported that their department does not have a case management system in place.

Of those that did, systems such as those created by Deloitte, SAS, or Thomson Reuters were the most popular, but none was used by more than 12% of surveyed investigators. This lack of urgency on case management solutions is troubling, especially for a profession that wants to improve its fraud prevention efforts. Efficiency in managing cases will allow agents to identify more fraud with cases of similar crimes, locations, and illicit actors.

2. Establish effective cybersecurity measures

New cybersecurity measures, such as implementing two-factor authentication, encryption, ID management, and more can go a long way to protect government agencies from data breaches, ransomware, and other intrusions.

Fortunately, most respondents say their department has implemented cybersecurity measures to prevent the kind of cyber-attacks that are specifically aimed at obtaining private citizen information and other departmental data. Any cybersecurity breach can have disastrous consequences for the government agency and the community it serves, and preventing that allows agents to more confidently move ahead with their work.

3. Hire more professional investigators

The steep challenge of hiring and staffing in government agencies is unsurprisingly of major concern to agency leaders. When ranking the biggest challenges that departments are facing, recruiting new talent and the loss of institutional knowledge from retiring staff were among the top three concerns cited by survey respondents.

Clearly, fraud prevention efforts would be boosted by having more staff on the front lines of the fight, and yet a shrinking number of respondents said their department is hiring more anti-fraud workers within their home state.

4. Implement a better public records search solution

Finding the correct information quickly from public records is critical for fraud investigators; yet almost half still depend on free search engines for much of their needs, which can present problems. Fortunately, a similar number of fraud investigators are also using third-party search platforms, such as Thomson Reuters CLEAR.

This is a very useful step forward. While online search engines are designed to deliver the single best answer to a search query, more proprietary investigative solutions are designed to pull multiple sources of data together from various transparent sources, and then show how they’re connected — for example, whether two people are married or live at the same residence. This heightened level of information and insight can prove extremely valuable during an investigation and can prevent further fraud down the road.

In a perfect system, there would be no fraud, waste, or abuse, because superior fraud prevention measures would make it impossible, rendering detection and investigation somewhat unnecessary. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as a perfect system, which is why efforts to improve current systems and procedures that emphasize fraud prevention are such a high priority for many state and local governments.

You can learn more about how to prevent fraud, waste, and abuse in Thomson Reuters’ latest report here.

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