A monitoring program using software from SAS and i2 was instrumental in catching 20 Work and Income staff who stole nearly $1 million in benefits over the past two years.
WINZ head Peter Hughes says staff can’t get away with fraud in the future because of the Ministry of Social Development’s data mining operations.
The ministry, which oversees WINZ, has developed a monitoring program to identify high-risk actions or patterns of behaviour in relation to benefit maintenance. MOSD IT staff didn't want to elaborate on how the system works. It uses SAS software to analyse data from the data warehouse as well as i2 Analyst Notebook to check for trends in data.