SRA enlisted to help USDA fight fraud

SRA International Inc. has won an Agriculture Department single-award blanket purchasing agreement to develop anti-fraud technology. The 10-year BPA has a ceiling value of $25 million if all options are exercised.

The goal is to improve fraud detection on an ongoing basis, for both known and unknown types of fraud, SRA officials said.

USDA's Food and Nutrition Service wants SRA to develop the next generation of an anti-fraud locator using the electronic benefits transfer retailer transactions system known as ALERT.

The ALERT system is a fraud-detection system that monitors and tracks electronically conducted retail transactions of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) recipients at authorized meal program and food retailer locations.

The system helps manage the SNAP program by providing transaction-level information to the federal personnel responsible for the program’s retailer management and compliance activities, the officials said.

SRA will work with the Food and Nutrition Service to develop the next-generation ALERT system, to enhance its functionality and modernize its technology.

SRA’s solution includes advanced analytics, data mining and pattern recognition to increase the volume of fraud detection. The company also has proposed a geographic information system solution that would give investigators the ability to detect fraud based on geospatial analysis.

SRA International, of Fairfax, Va., ranks No. 26 on Washington Technology’s 2009 Top 100 list of the largest federal government prime contractors.