BIG DATA ANALYTICS ASSURING COMPLIANCE, COMBATING FRAUD (IRS)
Client Challenge
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) needed assistance with their Compliance Data Warehouse (CDW)—a system that integrates data from more than 20 different source systems within the agency. Brillient was awarded two separate five year contracts to help the IRS undertake this massive “big data” effort. Throughout this project, Brillient also assisted with a variety of data tasks including the integration of 10 years of individual and business tax return data from an assortment of legacy systems.
Brillient Solution
Brillient worked with the IRS to integrate this raw data through extraction, transformation, and load (ETL) processes, data enrichment, data masking, data modeling and scripting. This allowed the IRS to tackle the challenges of dealing with staggering amounts of data, identifying complex relationships and sorting through the tens of thousands of fields.
Some examples of our work on this contract include:
- Extensive research into open source tools for big data analytics
- Parsing unstructured data for analysis
- Social Network Analysis (SNA) research to help identify fraud and compliance issues
- Creating a data driven engine to identify tax returns for audits based on business rules
- Developing the Metadata Automator—a time-saving tool that analyzes data more quickly and at lower cost
Client Benefit
Although contracts are still underway, we have achieved impressive results for both the IRS and internally. The Metadata Automator has led to an 88 percent automation rate, significantly reducing the number of manual steps typically used throughout metadata creation process. IRS analysts now have more tools and information to combat fraud, optimize collections, and improve internal efficiency. This tool also allowed our analysts to produce such a high volume of metadata that it has saved us approximately $5M in consulting costs, giving the IRS far more additional value then initially included in the scope of the contract.