California Employment Development Department

Government, USA
Focus: expanding BI to more users

California is the fifth-largest economy in the world, and the California Employment Development Department (EDD) is the largest tax-assessing and collection entity in the state. Each year, the EDD collects US$40 billion in state employment taxes from 1.2 million employers and disburses, on average, $4.8 billion in unemployment insurance benefits to 2.2 million claimants.

The agency uses SAS Business Intelligence to combat benefit and tax fraud, and it plans to expand its BI environment significantly in 2008. The expansion will give more agents hands-on access to BI.

“There are increased internal customer demands for more data, more data views, and more data mining and data analysis capabilities,” says Dale Jablonsky, Deputy Director of the Information Technology Branch at EDD. 

Increasing BI access throughout the agency will boost revenue by reducing tax fraud, identifying more collectible cases and improving unemployment insurance fund solvency. The agency also expects to see an overall increase in program integrity through the identification of trends and emerging issues.

Jablonsky says he hopes EDD’s BI environment will become a model for other state departments and agencies in decision making and anti-fraud measures. “It is very rare that state government has all the necessary data to make good strategic decisions about governmental programs. It’s also very rare for government to combine their unique data stores to combat the underground economy or provide seamless services to our constituents.”