The U.S. Department of the Treasury recovered over US$375 million by deploying an advanced AI-powered fraud detection system in fiscal year 2023.

Check fraud has increased nationwide by 385% since the pandemic, the department said.  To counter this, the Treasury’s Office of Payment Integrity (OPI), under the Bureau of the Fiscal Service (Fiscal Service), has deployed an upgraded AI-powered process to combat the rise in fraud.

This initiative aims to swiftly identify and mitigate check fraud in near real-time, enhancing the efficiency of recovering potentially fraudulent payments from financial institutions.

Notably, this is the first time the treasury acknowledged the use of AI in fraud detection.

To address the increase in fraud, Treasury’s Office of Payment Integrity (OPI), within the Bureau of the Fiscal Service (Fiscal Service), implemented an enhanced process using AI to mitigate check fraud in near real-time by strengthening and expediting processes to recover potentially fraudulent payments from financial institutions, the department said in a statement.

“The Treasury Department is committed to safeguarding taxpayer dollars through payment integrity – paying the right person, in the right amount, at the right time, and ensuring that Social Security payments, tax refunds, and other types of checks, and people who are receiving them, are safe from fraud.

We are using the latest technological advances to enhance our fraud detection process, and AI has allowed us to expedite the detection of fraud and recovery of tax dollars,” said Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Wally Adeyemo.