E77: Rebuilding Trust in Government Identity and Fraud Controls

Jordan, I can relate a little bit to you on that.

When I tell people I worked in California government on procurement, they were like, why would you do us so dirty? Like that is so messed up, right? But now the mission is to help fix it and help fix it from the outside, which I'm going to be honest with you in this fraud and identity space, we have a ways to go.

I know.

So Kira has been doing some great work in this area and you in particular have been all over the country, with government agencies working on this.

But what I'm seeing and correct me if I'm wrong here, but fraudsters are outpacing government.

Fraudsters are outpacing everybody, but they're especially outpacing government.

So what are we seeing at the state and local level? And like, what are the pressures that they're sort of facing in this area right now?

Yeah, it's interesting.

So the conversation we're having around fraud is, I would say, probably one of industry's best kept secrets.

And it's been playing out now on a national scale.

And why do I say industry's best kept secret? Because fraud in and of itself is not new.

Financial services ecosystem has had to deal with this for over 20 plus years.

They have built a purchase and tools and things in order to get ahead of it, to combat it.

And yet it just so happened that I guess, if you will, because of the way in which the government originally many government organizations, whether we state or federal delivered services to constituents, how they were very much.

in person and manually driven and not digital that actually allowed them to uh negate the impact of fraud but you know it's like a it's a double-edged sword it's a great thing many services are now being offered digitally the worst part is that the same learnings the same lessons that many other industries have had 20 plus years to get ahead of now have to be solved

So I have to go into my bank, but nowadays I don't have to go into claim unemployment, right?

That's right.

That's right.

So when you're talking about when you're engaging with unemployment, if you're applying for a benefit or if you're trying to replace your driver's license, for an example, or you're engaging for health insurance, these are all areas high touch moments where someone, a citizen, a resident within a state may be engaging in a service.

You need to have confidence that they are who they claim to be ultimately, and it's not someone impersonating them.

And this is where it's become that much more ripe for attack because the same time as all these services were going online, we were seeing how technology was evolving, right? We saw the advent and the launch of a lot of great companies such as OpenAI or Anthropic and how they've just continued to mature while it just so happened that the tools, the large language models that they put out all then made it easier for people to leverage those same tool sets in order to conduct fraud, right? So again, Everything has gotten better digitally technology wise, but it's also made it easier for the adversary to attack.

I view this really for me as kind of likening to what will happen with security, cybersecurity.

I would say almost we'll say almost 10 years ago where basically everyone kind of had this realization that everyone's job was cybersecurity in some way, shape or form.

Everyone had to be vigilant.

The same thing is applying today within the fraud conversation.