LexisNexis Risk Solutions Launches Special Investigative Unit

LexisNexis Risk Solutions for Government has created a Special Investigative Unit (SIU) designed to help government agency customers better use its identity intelligence to keep communities safe by fighting fraud and ensuring program integrity.

The unit, a team of analyst and solution consultants focused on the law enforcement, education and federal, state and local government markets, will be lead by Monty Faidley, director of health and human services at LexisNexis.

“Our customers are our top priority. We exist to help government agencies meet their missions and program goals. We do this by applying our expertise in identity intelligence directly to their specific challenges. Under the new SIU model, our analysts bring our identity intelligence directly to our customers,” Faidley told eWEEK. “The SIU provides our customers with access to experts who can help them make sense of their data and optimize how they use our solutions to improve their results. The SIU team has expert knowledge in taking our data, combining it with the government customer’s data and displaying it visually to reveal actionable insights.”

Faidley noted that, in planning the SIU, the company factored in many considerations, including big data’s evolution.

“It keeps getting bigger, and many agencies struggle to make sense of their results. They need help filtering, analyzing and prioritizing big data down to the most actionable intelligence,” he said. “To provide this help via the SIU, we evaluated our current staff skill set, as well as our customer needs and demand and created the new structure.”

He said most government agencies have a siloed view of their citizens or customers and, in most instances, they are only looking at their own agency data.

“Sometimes, they may have access to information from other agencies. Government agencies need to understand how identities are being used across agency and program boundaries,” he said. “By looking across state and program boundaries, agencies can ask questions like: ‘What else is this identity doing in my state?’ Or, ‘In what other states is this identity active?’ Or, ‘Has this identity been stolen or used for fraud in the past?'”

The SIU will collaborate with customers in markets to provide better investigative solutions to curtail public assistance program fraud, reduce abuse of public funds, improve tax compliance and keep communities safe from crime, terrorism and cyber-threats, among many other applications.

“Sharing of information across boundaries through trusted platforms will allow agencies to solve crimes, help deserving citizens receive tax refunds, unemployment insurance and other government benefits, and protect taxpayer dollars in new ways,” Faidley said. “There is already a focus on mobile platforms as an approach for identity-proofing, and this mobile focus will continue to grow. Of course, the available data will continue to grow bigger and bigger. The key is providing actionable insights—small data answers to a big data problem.”