The use of AI to aid fraud discovery is “in everybody’s interest”, one of the tech leads at the UK’s Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has said, despite previous concerns around transparency.
Bryan Nelson, DWP’s Hybrid Cloud Service Transformation Lead, highlighted the use of AI in its job centre network and said DWP was looking into using the tech to root out benefit fraud during a talk on modernising legacy infrastructure at Oracle’s Cloud World Tour event in London.
He said: “We’ve been investigating AI for some time and will continue to do so… Using AI in the ‘fraud and error’ space is absolutely in everybody's interest, so that for us is a really, really exciting area.”
Nelson’s comments could risk irking some MPs though, with the department recently facing concern from the Public Accounts Committee over the impact of machine learning bias delaying “legitimate benefit claims.”
Last year the Public Law Project (PLP) also called for transparency on the use of AI systems and increased safeguards, while a Guardian FOI request in January revealed an internal assessment that benefit claimants “do not need to know” if their letters were being processed by an AI model.
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At the Oracle event, Nelson described using AI models to reduce the time it takes DWP workers to “help customers with fairly straightforward queries” and to “improve the accuracy of some of the information that’s being provided.”
However, AI was also mentioned frequently (37 times to be exact) in DWP’s 2023/24 accounts, which said its Integrated Risk and Intelligence Service (IRIS) was developing machine learning to “assist in the prevention and detection of fraud.”
While DWP also said its AI Steering Board and Advisory Group ensured safe use of the technology, the PLP said it provided “no meaningful information about what technologies DWP is piloting or actually using, nor how they are, or will be, deployed.”
DWP’s interest in AI is informed both by a growing push to use AI in the civil service and by an eagerness to build on its major legacy infrastructure modernisation programme and work bringing all IT services in-house.
This work has also led to DWP looking at increasing its contracts with CSPs like Oracle as it takes a “100% cloud” strategy, said Nelson, with exceptions only for “higher sensitive services”.
He said: “There has to be a good reason for something not to go to the cloud … There may be some instances where we do need some physical hosting, so we will accommodate around that, but I would say we’re not [taking] a ‘hybrid’ approach.”
