Using cloud to improve payment integrity for digital services

Government agencies continue to evolve and deliver more and more services digitally, but the challenge of reducing the risk of payment fraud and maintaining payment integrity still looms over large entities.

“Payment integrity is still a big problem in government and deserves our collective attention,” said AWS’ Saqib Sheikh in a recent FedScoop panel discussion.

“While improper payments and unknown payment amounts decreased from 2021, in 2022, they’re still amounting to $247 billion, representing about 5% of all payments dispersed. And the root cause flagged by program administrators continues to be data,” explained Sheikh, head of strategy and growth, federal and non-profits at AWS.

Amir Drusbosky, managing director at Deloitte Transactions and Business Analytics LLP, joined Sheikh on the panel to discuss how cloud computing solutions offer organizations better analysis tools to ensure the integrity of online payment solutions in additional to the ability to scale to demand and provide real-time data analysis.

“With the cloud, we can pull together this real-time payment information, your policy rules, your ERP data, your financial management system data, the fraud data, and make determinations across a bigger amount of data, making sure that we make more accurate determinations and make them faster,” he explained.

Drusbosky talked about the ways that the combination of cloud capabilities with concepts like zero trust allow agencies to better share data with one another – which both benefits consumers and beneficiaries by decreasing the burden for them to enter information over and over in different government systems, but also helps reduce fraud by making sure data is consistent across agencies.

And, Saqib notes that AWS’ relationships with organizations like Deloitte help agencies build out projects like these, which provide “enterprise scale data management solutions that can ingest, enrich and share financial data across the enterprise.”

“We as providers to government need to help them figure out a couple of things. One, how to bring data together that is locked away in legacy systems and infrastructure. Two, how to share that data in a controlled, secure and audited manner, so it respects the rules and regulations. And three, generating actionable insights based on that data so that those that are determining eligibility criteria for payments, for example, can make better decisions in real time.”

Watch the full panel and learn more about modern technologies that are helping federal agencies improve the delivery of customer services.

This video is the first in a series of panel interviews on Transforming the Digital Government Experience.

This video panel discussion was produced by Scoop News Group and FedScoop and underwritten by Amazon Web Services.

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