AI has been used to defraud people on everything from calling voters to designing gifts for celebrities. Now, the US Treasury Department says machine learning AI has played a key role in its improved fraud detection processes over the past year – if a broken watch can be fixed twice a day, maybe AI can do something good in one go?
In a new release, the Treasury Department says it prevented and recovered “fraud and improper payments” worth more than four billion dollars in the last fiscal year (October 2023 to September 2024). This figure represents a significant increase over the previous year, which reached only $652.7 million. A quarter of the $4 billion apparently comes from recovery by “accelerating the identification of Treasury check fraud with machine learning AI.” Also, is it like making a deal with the devil? Yes. But, that’s 2024.
The $1 billion comes with $2.5 billion in prevention to “identify and prioritize the occurrence of high-risk events” and another $680 billion in additional prevention measures.
The Ministry of Finance plans to share the technology with other government agencies, although some already use their own. The IRS, for example, has taken steps to use AI to find tax evaders, automate services and conduct research.
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