FAST (Fraud Analytics Streamlined Tax-nology)

Why FAST? Because we want to serve our honest taxpayers and reduce the cost of fraud management for our nation.

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Inspiration:

IRS serves the American public by investigating potential criminal violations of the Internal Revenue Code and related financial crimes in a manner that fosters confidence in the tax system and compliance with the law. It is the only federal law enforcement agency authorized to investigate federal criminal tax violations and pursues related financial crimes, such as money laundering, currency violations, and terrorist financing. These efforts are increasingly important given emerging threats in the global financial landscape. Given its sizable—and growing—responsibilities, it is important to highlight that today the IRS lacks the resources it needs to fully support these efforts. This at a time when investigations are getting more complex, as highly sophisticated criminals are turning to new and hard-to-detect ways to hide illicit gains from our sight. With Fraud Analytics Streamlined Tax-nology (FAST), the IRS will be able to do much more. The IRS's efforts in this space are imperative to helping target oligarchs and those who facilitate hiding their assets. More broadly, a well-funded investigations unit is critical to ensuring that the IRS has a workforce that is able to pursue the illicit behavior of highly sophisticated criminals who reap billions and billions of dollars of profits annually through complex financial crimes. The FAST solution empowers the IRS to exercise more due diligence and vigilance so that such events could be prevented in the future. We wanted to create a solution that solves a business problem in a creative and different way.

What it does:

The purpose of the FAST app is to make our society a safer place to live for all, by giving law enforcement tools and information literally at their fingertips for tracking and monitoring potential fradulent activity, through intelligent automation. Features include the ability to: • Recognize potential fraud indicators using AI technology. • Leverage Pega workflows to assist revenue agents in developing a civil or criminal cases by allowing the Revenue Agent, Fraud Specialist and Criminal Investigator share, organize and agree on various stages and capture information to Form 11661 and Form 2797, which are currently entered manually by the Revenue Agent and Fraud Specialist. • Replace many various fraud referral processes and systems with one simple platform. • Utilize Visualization to assist executives and managers to review various reports in the system. • Facilitate future fraud projects by analysis and next best action. • Analyze data in the system and standardize, facilitate and create one central repository for reporting purposes to reduce errors and tax burden on honest taxpayers.

  • Develop workflow tools to minimize the manual burden and improve operational efficiencies. • Integrate Pega’s Blockchain Innovation Toolkit to facilitate secure data sharing with third parties (e.g Department of Justice) to support investigations into non-filers and unreported income. • Increase coordination and communication between the various IRS lines of business break down silos, reduce the traditional fraud processing time and improve referral success rates. • Increase visibility into the inventory state, processing times and resource allocation to help facilitate decision-making and identify training opportunities. • Automate the reporting process to increase efficiency and substantially reduce potential errors.

How we built it?

FAST App has been built leveraging Pega's Low Code No Code capabilities and enhanced UI/UX. The timeframe in which this App has been built proves how fast Pega can convert concepts into production ready applications. We identified the work-flows from the very beginning when a revenue agent recognizes fraud indicators, fraud referral submission, acceptance of the fraud case by Fraud Specialist to Criminal Investigation. We built the workflows in Pega utilizing the workflows identified in the real fraud referral process. FAST is developed in AppStudio. Without any previous Pega experience, we rapidly developed this prototype in one week. We started by determining the 3 pillars defined by the Pega Express methodology. We identified our Microjourneys, Personas & Channels, and our Data model. We then configured the workflow and the majority of the views in the application using Pega App Studio’s simple drag and drop interface. Once the high level workflow was defined, we created our data model and added personas and channels to each stage in our workflow.

Challenges we ran into

Due to confidentiality reasons, we could not use real data. This impacted our ability to test the full power of Pega and the reports. This was the first time our team ever built a Pega Application. But we rose to the challenge and built it in one week. We only learned about the Pega Hackathon at the end, which only gave us one week to work on our project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

FAST can help our society be a safer place to live by empowering IRS revenue agents and law enforcement, making their jobs a little easier. The social impact that this App can have on our communities by increasing their faith in the IRS is what we are most proud and excited about. We configured a search page using Pega’s native elastic search integration. Users are able to search for Fraud case Reviews, Persons, or Projects in a fraction of a second. We enhanced this search to provide a fuzzy search capability which can be toggled on or off. We built out the Pega Fraud Referral Process that is representing the real workflows, which can potentially replace many various systems and reduce reporting functionalities and administrative difficulties. FAST enables the employees to chat among themselves and share best practices via Pulse. New employees get up to speed quicker.

What we learned

We have learned the low code process to build an application so we can focus more on the process and actual work other than complicated coding. Adopting low code application development and process automation can help generate actionable data insights, connect to auditing systems, and automate alerts and notifications. It also introduced the concept of the near-real-time analytics, which helps detect quality gaps and introduce preventive practices, such as alerting for inconsistencies. Conventional analytics processes run after the fact, months or maybe even years later, limiting the opportunity to fully exploit data for its potential. That is why near-real-time analytics is highly valuable for the IRS. The experience of learning how to build a Pega App along with the outcome of building a product for the greater social good is an unparalleled learning experience in itself. We had a great learning experience while creating this project. We also learnt activities, creating the portal, building for Change. Importantly we learned Teamwork and coordination across organizational silos.

What's next for FAST

In the upcoming months we plan to showcase FAST to various key stakeholders at the IRS, Federal Law Enforcement and demonstrate Pega's Build for Change and Low Code capabilities. We plan to leverage Pega’s Prediction Studio to build and configure entity and keyword text extraction models. These models are used in tandem with Pega’s OOTB NLP and Text Analyzer rules to extract and analyze topics on xxxxx cases to recommend Next Best Skills and Next Best Actions. We plan to build data flows to execute decision strategies recommending Next Best Primary Reviewer, Next Best Peer Reviewers, Next Best Fraud Category, and Next Best Action. These strategies make suggestions based on factors such as previous feedback, similar capabilities, seniority, and project work.

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