Government fraud investigators are overloaded. They work with thousands of documents, yet they must work with outdated hardware and software.

Worse yet, each investigator is an island. They are often isolated from other investigators and members of their teams. A lack of collaboration deprives investigators of the subject matter expertise that other investigators might have.

But the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) has resources for helping agencies and departments within the government modernize their IT. When an agency or department needs technical assistance, the GSA's Centers of Excellence can work with the government entity and trusted industry vendors to select and install software and hardware. They can also provide support and training for the agency or department employees using the new technology.

How Technology Helps Fraud Investigators

Fraud investigators know the drudgery of collecting, keying, and cleansing data. But these error-prone and slow manual tasks can be accomplished by automation. These tools can:

• Collect transaction data directly from financial institutions

• Scan and convert images of statements, receipts, checks, and other documents into electronic data

• Flag possible errors such as duplicate transactions

• Link entries with images to verify the entries

Rather than spending time on data handling, investigators can spend time analyzing data.

Fraud investigation software can provide models and visualizations for data analysis. This allows every investigator to have expert-level assistance in finding patterns that signify fraud. The best fraud investigation software has these models built into the system. These built-in models and visualizations will save your investigators from having to design and implement them from scratch.

How the Centers of Excellence Can Help Fraud Investigators

Fraud investigators are spread throughout the government. Most agencies and departments have inspectors, auditors, and investigators to:

• Enforce fraud and money laundering laws

• Identify fraudulent invoices from vendors and suppliers

• Find corrupt relationships with department insiders

Most of these teams are small and easily overlooked during budget meetings. This can often leave investigators without the resources or support to do their job efficiently. As a result, taxpayer money is wasted by the lack of tools to identify fraud, waste, and corruption.

Worse yet, the government falls behind in enforcing the laws. Taxpayers and victims of fraud never get the restitution they deserve from criminals who stole from them because legislators do not provide investigators with the manpower or resources to recover it. Being able to do more without breaking the budget can help the investigators fulfill their critical missions more efficiently.

But the government wants to ensure that all departments and agencies have the technology needed to support their missions. The GSA's Centers of Excellence assists agencies and departments in finding, acquiring, and using modern technical infrastructure to carry out their tasks.

How the Centers of Excellence Work

The Centers of Excellence can help an agency with:

• Modernizing enterprise architecture

• Securing data and hardware

• Planning migrations

• Updating networks

• Coordinating and planning modernization projects

• Acquiring infrastructure

• Training employees

• Developing a communication strategy

The Centers of Excellence include centers for:

• Artificial intelligence

• Cloud adoption

• Contact center

• Customer experience

• Data and analytics

• Infrastructure optimization

Of particular interest to fraud investigation units is the infrastructure optimization center. This center is tasked with assisting agencies and departments with acquiring the technology they need to perform their agency or department tasks. This process includes:

• Analyzing the government entity's needs

• Identifying industry partners and products that can supply that need

• Negotiating the acquisition

• Implementing the technology

• Providing support and training after implementation

By outsourcing these tasks to experts in technology acquisition within the government, your department or agency can modernize without overpaying outside contractors for project management services. Additionally, the team from the Centers for Excellence can negotiate with the outside vendor to get the best possible pricing for the new IT infrastructure. This will help departments and agencies stretch thin budgets and accomplish their missions without new appropriations.

Modernizing Your Department

Recently, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) revealed one of the biggest financial scams globally called the 'Pandora Papers'. The data consists of more than 11.9 million scattered confidential records in various formats. ICIJ took two years to sort, organize, analyze and verify the massive data by applying different tools and manual effort in investigating the fraud. Such large-scale frauds necessitate IT modernization to reduce time, effort, and resources spent on data preparation, analysis, verification, and investigation.

Besides, technology moves so quickly that any agency or department that falls behind can lose its edge in just a few years. But by keeping up with technology by modernizing periodically, your agency or department can perform its mission effectively and efficiently.

To learn more about the GSA's Centers of Excellence, visit the GSA's website.