SBA

DOJ's new FOCUS initiative wants better data-driven fraud cases. But it keeps its two best enforcement channels — whistleblower tips and data miner analytics — in separate silos. The real opportunity is connecting them.

Public data can source prosecution leads. An open-source fraud-scoring system, run against the full SBA PPP dataset, identified the same lenders, geographies, and loan populations that DOJ prosecuted — using nothing but a downloadable CSV and a standard laptop.