Wouldn’t it be nice if the world aligned with Sophocles and “Rather fail with honor than succeed by fraud?"
Just once I would like to turn on the TV news channels and not be bombarded with reports about someone bilking the public for their own personal gain. Wouldn’t it be nice if we did not have to continuously see Facebook postings from friends or relatives who just got ripped off while on vacation or for shoddy house repairs? Or hearing about how someone had their identity stolen and discovered that a thief was a shopping spree with their credit card?
Unfortunately, we all know that a certain percentage of the world’s population love to try and take shortcuts to wealth, power and notoriety. A small subset of people don’t do the right thing if no one is looking. We will continue to hear about cyber-attacks on retail store credit accounts, Ponzi schemes, officials taking bribes, and doctors overbilling hospitals or insurance companies.
Because of this, both public and private organizations spend millions of dollars fighting off fraud, waste and abuse annually. Though not all of us are directly affected, we are all feel it it in some way. We often don’t stop and think about why prices for products and services are higher to cover theft, or why we are forced to accept long, arduous terms and conditions to utilize mobile apps or play in a local sports league.
Unfortunately, illegal activities continue to cause hundreds of millions of dollars in damages and lost revenues and create a growing risk to personal safety. People, processes and things continue to interconnect at a high rate. Which, in turn, exposes an ever growing, inter-connected risk to all of us.
Governments and companies truly see the danger of these evolving threats and are not sitting idly by and hoping to for the best. Rather, they are leveraging new tools in the fight against fraud, waste and abuse. New technologies combined with good old-fashioned policy changes, human analysis of standard reporting and document management are being utilized to deter fraud and gain a competitive edge.
Here are a few examples of how government organizations are increasing transparency and combatting fraud waste and abuse:
- Government organizations are publishing results to the web or via mobile devices about how tax dollars are being spent on websites so citizens can see the results from the tax money they contributed
- Governments are leveraging real-time data feeds to proactively negate fraud as it occurs
- Governments are using sentiment analysis to spot fraud, waste and abuse
- Governments are starting to share information between departments, agencies or between local and national governments with
social collaboration software - Governments are providing mobile applications that citizens can download to report suspicious activities
- Government organizations are using predictive analytics to anticipate trends before they would otherwise be spotted
If you want to learn more about how government organizations are using new strategies to fight the battle against fraud, waste and abuse, go to:
Fighting Fraud: Research Highlights Governments’ Challenges in Ending Abuse
Let me know your thoughts on this ongoing threat to society as we know it.
