Integrated Fraud Communication Network (IFCN)

About the Program

Category: Information Technology (Best in Category)

Year: 2020

In 2019, Alameda County’s Information Technology Department (ITD) in partnership with the Social Services Agency (SSA) successfully redesigned and launched a web-based Integrated Fraud Communication Network (IFCN) application to bring efficiencies to the investigation process and to retire a 20 year old legacy mainframe application used by the SSA Program Integrity Division (PID).Alameda County assists more than 52,000 people who receive CalWORKs (assistance for families with children), CalFresh and General Assistance monthly. The PID unit protects the interests of those in genuine need and conserves taxpayer resources by detecting, deterring, and prosecuting fraud from those who obtain public aid they are not entitled to.The IFCN application gets a quarterly feed from the State on potential fraud cases. The application then collates supporting data from several ancillary systems and presents it to the investigator as a dashboard. This minimizes the processing time and reduces possible errors in the investigation. The application also presents all pertinent current and historical data related to a case, thereby reducing the need for printing and storing historical artifacts. Having the Personally Identifiable Information (PII) data in a secure application instead of paper files makes the entire business process around investigation more secure.