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State and Local
“What that means is that at some point in the last year essentially, one state has uploaded that email address or that bank account information and said, ‘This is associated with a suspi- cious claim,’” said Randy Gillespie, vice president of the National Association of State Workforce Agencies. The hub was created by NASWA’s UI Integrity Center, a joint federal and state initia- tive funded by the Labor Department.
About a dozen states were using the free hub before the pandemic. Partici- pation shot up in the past year along with the dramatic rise in UI claims, Gil- lespie said. Since then, only one state hasn’t signed a participation agreement, and 32 are consistent users.
Cross-matching states’
UI claims data
One of IDH’s main functions is multi- state cross-matching of UI claims. It has been doing that for 1.5 million to 3 million claims per week for the past several months, Gillespie said.
“As claims are filed in states, we receive and store the data for those claims,” he added. “Then as claims come in from other states, we sim- ply cross-match all the data from each state’s claims to each other. If the same Social Security number or other data is being used on a claim in more than one state, which should cause suspi- cion, each state is notified.”
Other data elements that can trigger an alert include bank account numbers, phone numbers, mailing addresses and email domains frequently associated with fraudulent activity. IDH will also flag claims filed via a foreign IP address.
States have three options for con- necting to the system. If they choose the application programming interface, the state’s system will automatically call the hub to perform an identity verifica- tion when a claimant logs in and will provide the results in real time. Alter- natively, states can send data via Secure File Transfer Protocol or upload it via the hub’s user interface.
“Unemployment insurance systems across the country vary widely in their technological advancement, and so the data hub was designed with three sepa- rate communication channels to allow
data with another,” Gillespie said. “We receive each state’s data and return it back to them with information on which other states also have those data points and which data elements got flagged by
which cross-match. The returned file also includes an ID verification score for each claimant with up to five reasons that drive that score.”
When a state sends information on a claim, IDH assigns a unique ID to that claim. If the Social Secu- rity number, for example, match- es one used in claims from other states, the hub flags the claim and alerts the states to the match.
Another function that Gillespie said has proven extremely useful during the pandemic is the secure messaging platform through which states can share informa- tion about emerging fraudulent activity. Users receive email noti- fications when a fraud alert is cre- ated or updated.
“All the approved data hub users across the country are enrolled in fraud alerting,” Gil- lespie said. “It’s allowing secure, real-time collaboration among
fraud investigators.”
NASWA created the UI Integrity Cen-
ter in 2014 to develop resources and tools for states to reduce improper unemployment payments and fraud. In 2017, it launched the Suspicious Actor Repository, which let participating states upload information about suspi- cious activity. As functions increased, the repository became IDH in 2018.
Gillespie said other agencies at the federal level could benefit from what IDH has accomplished. “We have had multiple conversations over the last several years with the Social Securi- ty Administration, with the IRS, with [the Federal Emergency Management Agency], with other federal benefit pro- grams,” he said. “We believe that the data hub is a model that other federal programs could either participate in or mirror.” n
A week’s worth of warning flags
In early April, the Integrity Data Hub cross-checked 1.5 million unemployment claims from 31 states and flagged:
15,600
Social Security numbers
13,000
email addresses
18,000
mailing addresses
26,000
bank accounts
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easier access to all states, regardless of their technology,” Gillespie said.
Each state identifies users who are approved to access the system, and IDH recently added multifactor authentica- tion for logins.
IDH is built on an Amazon Web Ser- vices-based microservices architecture for flexibility and scalability and uses AWS Kinesis with AWS Firehose, Kine- sis Data Analytics and Lambda for audit- ing, aggregation and reporting. The UI Integrity Center partners with another company to handle real-time identity verification and is working with Early Warning Services, a financial technology company, to add the ability to validate bank account information.
Real-time collaboration to stop fraud
“One of the key things that we say here is that we’re not sharing one state’s