Medicare claims, tax returns, PPP applications — the government already holds a closed, mostly clean dataset of every transaction it needs to find fraud. It doesn't need SARs or tips. It just needs to run the query.
DOJ's new FOCUS initiative wants better data-driven fraud cases. But it keeps its two best enforcement channels — whistleblower tips and data miner analytics — in separate silos. The real opportunity is connecting them.
Public data can source prosecution leads. An open-source fraud-scoring system, run against the full SBA PPP dataset, identified the same lenders, geographies, and loan populations that DOJ prosecuted — using nothing but a downloadable CSV and a standard laptop.
