Taka Ariga on Using AI to Combat Waste, Fraud, and Abuse in Public Programs

In the latest episode of Data for the People!, Data Foundation Senior Fellow Taka Ariga discusses the prospect of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance government efforts to prevent fraud and other types of improper payments in public benefit programs.

Ariga was the first Chief Data Scientist at the Government Accountability Office (GAO) where he also directed GAO’s Innovation Lab. He later served as the Chief Data Officer (CDO) and Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. He is now a Senior Fellow with the Data Foundation and the founder of Sol Imagination, an AI advisory company.

Amanda Cash, the Senior Director of the Data Foundation’s Center for Data Policy, joins the episode as a co-host.

Using AI to curb waste, fraud, and abuse in government programs

Recent rapid advancements in generative AI and the widespread adoption of publicly available AI chatbots have sparked conversations in the nation’s capital about how these tools could help reduce improper payments in federal benefits programs. Ariga cautions against buying into any hype that any one AI solution can root out all fraud, but he does believe AI can boost the prevention of fraud and other forms of improper payments.

“ What I do see is a lot of focused, specific applications of AI across the lifecycle of assessment, detection, investigation, and prevention where AI can really make significant impacts,” he says on the episode. Machine learning can identify transactional anomalies, for example. “Algorithms are really good at highlighting things that don't quite pass the smell test.”

One area where AI could be particularly beneficial, Ariga says, is in the detection of fraud risk. To illustrate how, Ariga points listeners to a recent study that suggested generative AI tools can enhance the effectiveness and speed of experienced auditors while reducing the performance gap between experienced and early-career auditors.

The role of federal Chief Data Officers in agencies’ AI agenda

During the episode, Ariga also reflects on a recent finding from a Data Foundation/Deloitte survey of federal CDOs showing that  30 percent of federal CDOs are also serving as their agency's Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer, up from 13 percent in the same survey the year before.

Asked whether he was encouraged to see CDOs leading agencies’ AI agenda, or worried about CDOs being asked to do too much, Ariga says, “it's less about how many hats you wear, but more about whether the CDOs are actually empowered to shift that focus from technology to data.”

He notes that CDOs are well-suited to balance innovation with ensuring guardrails are in place to prevent data leaks and inappropriate uses of data. “We have to provide a level of privacy and security to everything that we do, and a governmental entity cannot rely on the best hits of what the internet has to offer,” he says.

Data Governance and Trust Will Be Key in AI Adoption

CDOs also have a key role to play in ensuring agencies have strong data governance practices, which in turn will give them a clear understanding of their data’s reliability, Ariga says. That’s important because public sector leaders need to be confident in the insights they receive from AI tools that are built on the foundation of public data before they’ll use them for consequential decisions.

 “AI adoption will only happen at the speed of confidence, not at the speed of innovation,” he says. “We have to have a certain amount of trust behind what the chatbots are telling us.”

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Learn more about the Data Foundation's 2026 Advocacy and Policy Agenda, including our support for ensuring government data is high quality and can serve as essential training infrastructure for AI systems.