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Money laundering, VAT fraud, forged invoices, covert financing
Detection of administrative document fraud
Our client, a Ministry, wanted to improve its controls of administrative document assignment.
The size of the database (nearly one hundred million lines) and the diversity of the successive applications used to input information - generally manually - over the last few decades was seriously limiting the ability to detect problems.
Proposed solution
Reconciliation of postal addresses of the beneficiaries with the BAN - National Address Base has allowed us to obtain reliable and standardized addresses.
Deduplication multi-criteria (name + first name + address) and multi-strategy (phonetic, Levenshtein distance, N-gram*...) to identify people who have obtained several administrative documents that are supposed to be unique.
Blurred joints with other databases of the ministry on the name and first name (phonetic+ N-gram) as well as on the date of birth (with a tolerance of a few days) in order to identify people with several administrative documents that cannot be combined.
Gains
The Ministry was able to identify people (sometimes up to several hundred in a single département) who were holding several versions of the same administrative document and could therefore avoid certain penalties. This had previously gone unnoticed thanks to similar spelling of names, similar addresses (e.g. street number for the neighboring building) and similar dates of birth (1 to 2 days’ discrepancy). An aggravating factor was that it was impossible to obtain these documents without complicity within the Ministry.
Standardized postal addresses mean that it is now possible, simply by grouping and counting them, to identify addresses suspected of having been used to request a number of administrative documents that is far greater (by a factor of 10 or even 100) than the number of people actually living at a particular address.
Data matching multiple databases has uncovered many examples of prohibited accumulations of administrative documents.