LA County uses Analytics sheriff

LA: A warning to public assistance fraudsters in Los Angeles County: There’s a new sheriff in town. LA County is using SAS Analytics to identify fraudulent activities, enhance investigations and prevent improper payments to those who would take advantage of the system.

A 2008 data mining pilot program in LA County achieved an 85 per cent accuracy rate in detecting collusive fraud rings, and would have resulted in a total annual savings of at least $6.8 million. Based on these promising results, in December 2009 the LA County Board of Supervisors unanimously approved a contract to use SAS to detect and prevent benefits fraud in the CalWORKs Child Care Stage 1 program. The Stage 1 program spans an eligible family’s entry into California’s welfare assistance program until the work situation and child care is stable, ideally within six months.

The Los Angeles County Department of Public Social Services serves over two million customers daily and issues almost $3 billion in benefits annually. “Welfare fraud investigators and staff throughout LA County DPSS are excited to use this cutting-edge data mining technology to help reduce, detect and prosecute welfare fraud,” said DPSS Director Philip Browning.

LA County will use the SAS Fraud Framework for Government, which can be applied to many areas of government — from detecting collusive patterns in entitlement programs such as Medicare and Medicaid to purchase-card fraud, bid-rigging and terrorist financing.

“This technology will be a vital tool in our effort to prevent public assistance fraud and enhance the district attorney’s fraud investigations,” said Los Angeles County Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich, who wrote the motion implementing the program in Los Angeles County.

The SAS Fraud Framework detects suspicious activity then prioritizes and routes the resulting alerts to the appropriate decision makers. It uses SAS Social Network Analysis to uncover previously hidden linkages between participants and providers engaged in fraud to facilitate the investigation, capture and display of key information pertinent to the case.

Using SAS Solutions OnDemand, SAS will host LA County’s extensive recipient data in a secure environment. This approach expedites implementation, and frees up resources the county would have had to devote to additional staff and hardware.

“SAS uses patterns and characteristics associated with fraud to create models that score recipients and child care providers on the likelihood they will commit fraud in the future,” said Manuel H. Moreno, Research Director, Chief Executive Office, Service Integration Branch. “By analyzing documents related to services including welfare, health care, in-home support services and food stamps, the technology can actually prevent fraud before it occurs.”