“You’re killing yourself. I have to protect you from you.”, said Mr. Hannibal Ware, the Small Business Administration’s inspector general, to his agents, limiting his agents to working 10 cases at a time. That’s how overworked the fraud investigators are investigating the biggest fraud in American history.
During the pandemic, government aid programs provided roughly $5 trillion in relief money to individuals and businesses to help ease the financial blow inflicted by Covid-19.
In the form of unemployment benefits and business loans, the money went to households, small businesses, hospitals, schools, and other institutions to help reduce poverty and save the country from a painful recession.
These financial transfusions helped millions of newly unemployed workers pay bills, and stay afloat. And the economy was able to recover faster from the largest downturn since the Great Depression than it otherwise would have.
But the programs used little oversight or vetting and opened the doors to one of the biggest frauds in American history.
It’s estimated that billions of dollars were stolen by thousands of people through fraudulent loans and unemployment benefit schemes.
One official estimates that the total of improper unemployment payments alone could be over $163 billion.
From false unemployment claims to loans for nonexistent businesses, there are over 39,000 cases with hundreds of investigators on the job trying to catch up with these swindlers.
Fortunately, due to a Centers of Excellence initiative that accelerates IT modernization at federal agencies, many investigators from the F.B.I., the Secret Service, the Postal Inspection Service, and the Internal Revenue Service who are working on these cases have critical tools at their disposal.
Helping them process and analyze the mountains of data attached to these cases are all-in-one tools, such as ScanWriter, which automates, manages, and creates data visualizations in record time.
Many investigators across various agencies are yet to adopt the digital way of working and benefit from automation.
Advanced Technology Facilitates Fraud Investigations
Trusted by many investigators in federal agencies, the all-in-one data integration and analysis tool, ScanWriter, provides quick and precise automation for otherwise laborious and time-consuming tasks.
These are some of the features built into ScanWriter that facilitate Covid-fraud and many other fraud investigations:
Data Entry Automation
With its data entry automation feature, ScanWriter can convert any paper document or digital file into normalized data on Excel or data visualization on Power BI.
It can process large files in minutes without sacrificing accuracy and ensures speed and precision.
Checks comprise a large part of the information in fraud cases. ScanWriter’s check reader automatically reads, captures, and organizes data from all checks.
It picks up everything on the check image, computer-typed or handwritten, including the memo field, routing number, and signatures. And it supports different formats and image quality.
Anything that’s on a check can be captured and read by ScanWriter. If you can read it, so can ScanWriter.
Also read: How Can Fraud Investigators Easily Convert Credit Card Statements To Excel With 100% Accuracy?
Source – ScanWriter – Asset Tracing Tool – Handwritten Check Image Reading
Asset Tracing Through Data Visualization
After it captures data from scanned, paper or PDF documents, ScanWriter converts it to Excel to provide an organized view of your information.
It automatically separates and categorizes documents by type and generates reports, which can be customized to find connections that aid in the investigations.
Standardizing and normalizing data for Excel provides an organized view of the information. ScanWriter takes this analysis capability one step further by integrating processed data with Power BI to generate visualizations of patterns, activities, and relationships of the data.
Customizable to your case strategy, data enrichment can fit every analyst’s needs for desired connections, patterns, and insights.
Included in this feature are pre-created models, such as the “Flow of Funds” model, which graphically illustrates where money is coming from, where it’s going, who was involved, and more.
Models such as this one help the fraud investigator scrutinize the movement of funds by turning data into coherent, visually immersive, and interactive insights that can be used to eloquently and persuasively support a case.
Also read: How Technology Can Help Fraud Investigators Follow The Money To Trace Assets?
Source – ScanWriter – Asset Tracing Tool – Data Visualization – Follow the Money
Case Management
ScanWriter’s case management software hel