For us, the line between biomedical and health care and business data (the way we run our organization) is how we differentiate between business data, which is human capital data, human expenditures, and budget data.” The Department of Treasury’s Denial of Payment Operations Center works with agencies to detect improper payments through incidents of error, fraud, waste, or abuse.
We have data-centric tools such as an
Online portal with automatic data matching capabilities, that help detect improper payments,” said Iannotta at the Treasury Department. “We use data as a source to determine eligibility. For example, an agency may have recently made a payment to a deceased person, or a company may have recently been banned from doing business with the federal government.
The challenge for government agencies
Such as the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Treasury is to process increasing amounts of data while still needing to ensure that the data is accurate. “Having accurate data is fundamental to making the right decisions about whether to take action on improper payments,” said Iannotta.
However, making these decisions based
On inaccurate data is going to cause a lot of heartbreak.” Inaccurate data can not only cause heartbreak for government, it can also cause serious financial losses as well as public mistrust. “Our biggest issue is the amount of data we have,” Brandon said. “We have over $100 million in grants and we have to verify hundreds of millions of sources. Making sure all the data we have is high quality and telling the right story is also the biggest challenge.
The biggest data challenge facing government
Comes down to the quantity and quality of data. “At the end of the day, there’s a quality and quantity issue,” Straub said. “When people go out and input data into the system, the data stays in the system. Once you get a lot of data, it becomes very difficult to manage.