GAO to lean more on analytics for government accountability

[caption id=”attachment_21645” align=”alignnone” width=”1024”] Photo: Kevin Harber[/caption]

U.S. Government Accountability Office announced it will create a Center for Advanced Analytics to bring a more data-driven approach into its work.

GAO says the new center’s primary goals are to:

• enhance access to data sources
• assess, customize, and help deploy new technologies
• promote novel analytic approaches
• strengthen analytical skills

“In future years, we are hoping to improve our capabilities so that we can analyze even larger data sets,” says GAO on its blog. “We are also increasing the use of text analysis. This would allow us to look for key phrases, matches, and similarities in unstructured data—such as large text documents—to help identify patterns, such as those that might indicate potential fraud or improper payments.”