The NSW Government gave out details at the 2021 digital.NSW event.

The Government of Australian state New South Wales (NSW) is deploying AI, data analytics and the blockchain in various administrative applications, according to statements by officials at the 2021 digital.NSW event. (ZDNet)

Detecting fraudulent COVID grants

The NSW revenue department is combing through data to assess whether recent grants to businesses for COVID-19 were fraudulently obtained, or overpaid.

“[We’re] using a rule-based system where we can enhance irregular patterns in the data that we’re seeing and quickly move them through a modelling process into investigation for fraud and compliance,” Scott Johnston, Revenue NSW deputy secretary and State Revenue chief commissioner, told the audience at the event.

Johnston revealed that given the pandemic circumstances, it was extremely important to disburse the grants as quickly as possible.

Over a quarter of a million businesses availed of the grants.

There was “extreme urgency to ensure that people got the money that they needed to but also to do it in the right way, and a lot of responsibility over the next six months and 12 or more will fall on us to effectively drive this this effort,” Johnston said.

However, it was not possible to look at all of them to determine issues relating to fraud and compliance.

“So, if we can use our artificial intelligence from combining our data sets in different ways in predicting what vulnerability looks like, and through machine learning continuing to refine and improve that model, we only do better.”

Assessing the trustworthiness of buildings

The Office of the NSW Building Commissioner worked with KPMG, Microsoft, Australian Securities Exchange (ASX), Western Sydney University, and Mirvac to create a trust index for use inside the government’s building assurance solution.

For each building, depending on its drawings, the materials used for construction, and the builders, the blockchain-based index solution will give an idea of its provenance.

“You, as a consumer, can now see one building differentiated from another and that helps the insurance companies and the financiers as well, because at the moment, they do not want to be in the market because all the buildings look the same to them, everybody has an occupation certificate, but why are some buildings still defective as we find in our audits, and some are not,” said Digital Director Yin Man.

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