All things being equal, catching $117k in double payments sounds great.
I'm curious of it's a net win, though, once all the costs (and benefits) are considered.
I'm curious of it's a net win, though, once all the costs (and benefits) are considered.
To be fair, I wouldn't be surprised if there are additional benefits beyond the $117k. For example:
- Reducing the attack surface of fraudulent invoicing.
- Retaining staff/skill that are useful in other projects not discussed in the article.
- Seeding awareness/interest for similar projects in other departments of the state government.
This was 117K was found in transactions during 8 out of 12 months in the year. The article doesn't specify the amount of money transacted during that time. It doesn't give us the total amount of transactions either.
It gives an estimate of 18 million in the total year so the closest estimate is 117k out of 12 million. Which is ~1% and seems like a win win. State employees and folks should feel good that they aren't fucking up very often and the analysts should feel good because functionally this number should go to 0. Operationally no idea what it would cost to maintain though. cough
However the pilot program only analyzed transactions from Jan to Sept. For all state agencies (which seems impressive from an aggregation and governance stand point). With in that time period it found 117k in duplicates, so assuming that dollar/transactions are at a constant rate through out the year (they aren't).
117,000/(18,000,000 * (8/12)) ~ .975 % loss in state to vendor(?) transactions.
Put another way, with in the time period they studied assuming 12 million dollars in transactions were made, they can potentially recuperate roughly 1% of the total value transacted.
For comparison there's a Kaggle dataset of 2 days of European credit card transactions from 2013. It contains 284k transactions of which 0.147% are fraudulent.
This 1000x difference can either be good since it means the state is mostly paying appropriately or bad since the detection is not as good as the credit card company's.
god damnit you're right. whoops