Fact Sheet — Pandemic Analytics Center of Excellence (PACE), Pandemic Response Accountability Committee

Summary

Fact sheet from the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PRAC) on the Pandemic Analytics Center of Excellence (PACE), which the PRAC established to help oversee more than $5 trillion in pandemic-related emergency spending. It states that the PRAC has shared federal spending data sets with 28 OIGs and placed 12 Fellows with member OIGs through a Data Science Fellows program. The fact sheet announces a multiple award Blanket Purchase Agreement for small businesses, awarded to seven companies to support the PACE over the next four years, with the first task order awarded to i3 LLC. It lists four pillars: sharing data, tools, and services; promoting leading practices; conducting data analysis and visualization; and providing investigative support.

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FACT SHEET – Pandemic Analytics Center of Excellence (PACE) Drives Analysis of
Pandemic Response Funds to Identify Risks and Fight Fraud, Waste, and Abuse

To support its mission and that of its Office of Inspectors General (OIG) members, the
Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PRAC) has established the Pandemic
Analytics Center of Excellence (PACE) to provide a leading-edge analytic platform with the
capacity and scale to help oversee more than $5 trillion in pandemic-related emergency
spending. The PACE delivers analytic, audit, and investigation support to the oversight
community as they root out historic levels of fraud, waste, and abuse in pandemic relief
programs to ensure funds are used for their intended purpose.

With $5 trillion in funding to oversee and widespread fraud reported across multiple relief
programs, the PACE was built to help agencies find the highest risk areas to investigate. We
combine oversight data in one place with a suite of enhanced analytic tools – so it can be
shared and used to find fraud. One of the PACE’s strategic priorities is to provide risk
models to both assist oversight professionals with prioritizing program recipients for audit
and investigation, including triaging fraud complaints received from the public.

The PACE applies the best practices from the former Recovery Accountability and
Transparency Board’s Recovery Operations Center (ROC), which supported OIGs in oversight
of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. With the ROC, we learned that
OIGs could better identify fraud and improper payments by combining data sets and using
tools such as link analysis, text mining, and anomaly detection. The DATA Act of 2014
authorized the U.S. Department of the Treasury to transfer the ROC’s assets to Treasury
when the organization sunset, but Treasury elected not to do so and the ROC was dissolved
in September 2015.

Since 2015, data access and analytical
capabilities have increased in the
oversight community. Congress
provided OIGs an exemption from the
Computer Matching Act which enables
greater data sharing, and many OIGs
have created their own data analytics
units. Rather than recreating a larger,
single system, the PACE has adopted a
Center of Excellence operating model
to fight fraud, share the excellence in
analytics occurring among OIGs, and
act as an accelerator for OIGs
regardless of their size or current
analytic capability. Our four pillars are: sharing data, tools, and services; promoting leading
practices; conducting data analysis and visualization; and providing investigative support.

In developing the PACE, the PRAC’s goal was to build an affordable, flexible, and scalable
analytics platform that can support OIGs during their pandemic-related work and beyond the
organization’s sunset date in 2025.

The PACE is led by the PRAC’s Chief Data Officer, who in coordination with the Chief
Information Officer, is responsible for the coordination of technology, data, and business
priorities.

Sharing Data, Tools, and Services: To date, the PRAC has acquired dozens of public and
non-public federal spending data sets and has shared this data with 28 OIGs to help
investigators better identify fraud that crosses agency boundaries.

In addition, the PACE promotes best practices; provides services to OIGs who lack data
analytics capabilities; provides leading edge tools and training to OIG professionals; and
promotes overall data literacy throughout the oversight community. The PACE established a
Data Science Fellows program and to date has placed 12 Fellows with member OIGs.
Fellows utilize sophisticated analytics tools to identify trends, patterns and anomalies to
detect and prevent suspected fraud, waste, abuse and mismanagement of covered funds.
This program provides public service opportunities to current data science students and
recent graduates and a pipeline of technical talent to the oversight community.

Today, the PACE announced a multiple award Blanket Purchase Agreement (BPA)
acquisition to strengthen the PRAC with IT & data management, analytics & visualization,
and investigative support services. The acquisition was set aside for small businesses in
recognition of the innovation and creativity that small businesses provide in developing
analytics with a focus on fraud and abuse. Seven companies— A Square Group LLC, ASR
Analytics, Elder Research, eSimplicity, i3 LLC, Praescient Analytics, and Total Systems
Technologies Corporation (TSTC)— were awarded the BPA to support the PACE and partner
OIGs over the next four years. The first task order was simultaneously awarded to i3 LLC to
strengthen the PACE’s underlying technology infrastructure and data environment, select
and deploy analytic tools, develop analytic rules and models, and provide investigative
support. This BPA will support PACE’s future needs and was designed to be available for
use by OIGs as a shared service in support of their unique pandemic oversight efforts.

Promoting Leading Practices: In September 2020, the PRAC created a data sharing
working group that meets regularly and identifies data projects that cross agency and
program boundaries. The PACE works in close collaboration with the working group which is
leading a project on recipient multi-dipping and Paycheck Protection Program fraud. The
PACE hosted a Data & Analytics Expo for the CIGIE community in June 2021 to highlight
current OIG analytic tools, standards, and practices. Additionally, the PRAC held an
International Data Forum with counterparts from the United Kingdom and Australia in early
July 2021 that featured discussion of pandemic relief programs in each country, the
challenges faced in overseeing those relief programs, and how innovative approaches to
data sharing and analytics allowed officials to address those challenges. The PACE is also
working in close collaboration with the PRAC’s Identity Fraud & Redress Working Group
which is examining fraud associated with pandemic relief and will issue findings to improve
the effectiveness of identity verification for beneficiaries.

Conducting Data Analysis and Visualization: Our analytic support tools include data
matching, anomaly detection, risk modeling, social network analysis, robotic process
automation, geospatial analysis, link analysis, business intelligence, and open-source
intelligence. Currently, the PACE is supporting the OIG community to use robotic process
automation to automate tasks associated with monitoring pandemic spending – an activity
that currently requires manual review. This project will save critical time for both the OIG
and the recipients that report spending information. In addition, we are assisting OIGs with
development of risk models to help identify high-risk recipients of pandemic funds for
additional audit or investigative oversight. We developed reusable computer code that we
shared with OIGs which can be used to find every instance of a person or company across
various data sources regardless of differences in the data (such as different spellings and
alternative addresses).

Providing Investigative Support: The PACE supports OIG investigations and the PRAC Fraud
Task Force through both ad hoc and proactive projects. Our data analytics effort is
harvesting and mining data for the Task Force to investigate leads and prosecute fraud. Our
social network analysis supports investigative work by uncovering insights on networks of
individuals who may have defrauded pandemic relief programs.

Fulfilling the PRAC’s mission of rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse in pandemic COVID
response spending requires better technological tools, including the use of advanced data
analytics to reveal ever-evolving fraud schemes and enable government agencies to take a
proactive stance in preventing fraudulent payments; strengthen compliance and audit
efforts; and recover ill-gotten gains. The PACE is providing the oversight community with the
tools, expertise, and enhanced capacity needed to ensure that pandemic response funds
are used for their intended purpose, and not wasted or misused.

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