UK fraud solution implemented at The Kent Intelligence Network (KIN)

Kent County Council is the largest local authority in England covering an area of 3,500 square kilometres. It has an annual expenditure of over £1bn and a population of 1.3m. The Council provides a wide range of personal and strategic services on behalf of its residents, operating in partnership with twelve district councils and around three hundred parish and town councils.

The Kent Intelligence Network

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) estimates that fraud costs the public sector alone around £37.5 billion a year and is equivalent to 5.5 per cent of the £694 billion spent annually. Fraudulent claims made against local authorities for various types of financial support are responsible for a significant proportion of these losses. Such fraud and corruption not only reduces available resources to support legitimate claimants but also lessens even further the amount of money that can be spent on essential public services at a time of severe pressure on budgets.

In response to this situation the Counter Fraud Team within Kent County Council has set-up the Kent Intelligence Network (KIN); a Kent-wide partnership between local authorities with the shared objectives of the detection, prevention and deterrence of fraud and corruption, and where possible the recovery of taxpayer money that has been claimed unlawfully.
Detection is facilitated through close collaboration between member organisations who share a wide range of pre-existing data sets with the KIN. By joining this data together to produce an integrated view for the whole region the KIN can apply advanced analytics which identify matches and patterns within the data that indicate potential fraud.

The Connexica Solution

To support the needs of the KIN, Connexica have developed a solution based on their established CXAIR data management and analytics platform called CXFIRE (Connexica Fraud Investigation and Reporting Engine). CXFIRE unifies a series of existing data sets provided by the fifteen local authorities that are KIN members and makes that data available within a common searchable repository. This repository is held in a secure Cloud-based hosted environment, where access to the data is managed according to the strict security and information governance rules that have been agreed by the KIN members as a basis for the data sharing.

Innovative data matching algorithms are applied to the data within the repository to identify instances where a record with similar characteristics exists more than once in a single data set, or exists across multiple data sources in a way which suggests that a claim may potentially be fraudulent.
The deployed solution is highly flexible and extensible, it is anticipated that it will evolve and expand during the lifetime of the solution through the inclusion of additional data sources and the development of additional matching algorithms. It is also anticipated that additional organisations will join the KIN as members, thus increasing the scope and sophistication of the data matching processes which can be created.

Paul Rock, Kent Counter Fraud Manager, said of CXAIR “The Kent Intelligence Network required a flexible tool that had both strict information governance controls, data matching capability and reporting for outcomes. We chose CXAIR after a competitive tender process following a bid by Connexica and subsequent demonstration. We are pleased and excited with the resulting solution and other members of the network have begun to use CXAIR for their other internal projects.”

Forecasted savings from the Kent Intelligence Network are £4m in the first five years of operation.

“Through our experience in counter-fraud, combined with the benefits of using the [CXFIRE] solution, we are confident we will meet our projected savings goal of £4million”
Paul Rock, Counter Fraud Manager, Kent County Council

On Tuesday 21st February Connexica will be showcasing the CXFIRE solution to industry experts at Fraud and Error 2017 in London. The event will see various presentations including Robert Patterson Head of Internal Audit at KIN who will be discussing - Tackling Fraud Across Local Authorities Through Data Sharing: The Kent Intelligence Network (KIN)

“We are thrilled to be working with The KIN on this project, the event will provide a fantastic opportunity for us to meet with industry experts and discuss how innovative solutions like CXFIRE can be used to turn information into actionable insight.”
Gary Luke Managing Director, Connexica

Staffordshire-based Connexica specialises in the development of CXAIR, the search powered business analytics solution, which it sells directly and through a global network of partners. The company’s extensive experience in business analytics and search technology has enabled them and its partners to deliver innovative self-service solutions to organisations across many industries.

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This release was published on openPR.