In the realm of federal financial oversight, agencies are tasked with the monumental challenge of investigating and understanding people, companies, organizations, and assets. Whether it’s vetting vendors, detecting fraud, or identifying risks associated with foreign adversaries, the ability to accurately assess these entities is paramount. The stakes are high, and yet many agencies struggle with a fundamental piece of this puzzle: entity resolution (ER).

The Complexity of Entity Resolution at Scale

Entity resolution is the process of matching and linking records about people, organizations, and the relationships between them, both within and across internal and external data sources. It is a critical component in creating 360-degree views of entities, which feed downstream systems that support investigative, compliance, and enforcement missions. But despite its importance, Entity Resolution remains an overwhelming challenge for many federal agencies, particularly at the scale and speed required for modern operations.

Why is Entity Resolution so difficult? The answer lies in its inherent complexity:

• Data Volume & Variety: Agencies deal with massive amounts of structured and unstructured data from multiple sources, often in different formats and languages.
• Data Quality Issues: Inconsistent, incomplete, or outdated information makes it hard to link records accurately.
• Duplication & Discrepancies: Resolving multiple records referring to the same entity requires sophisticated algorithms to detect subtle variations in names, addresses, and other identifying attributes.
• Real-Time Performance Needs: Investigative and compliance teams need Entity Resolution solutions that operate at machine speed without compromising accuracy.
• Integration Challenges: Existing technologies are often difficult to implement into existing workflows and lack interoperability with other systems.
• Cost Considerations: Many Entity Resolution solutions are prohibitively expensive to deploy and maintain, making them unsustainable for large-scale operations.

The High Stakes of Inadequate Entity Resolution

For federal financial agencies, failing to perform Entity Resolution effectively has real consequences. Consider these scenarios:

• Fraud Detection: Without accurate entity resolution, fraudsters can slip through the cracks, obtaining federal benefits they are not entitled to.
• Sanctions & Compliance: Poor Entity Resolution can lead to misidentification of individuals and companies, causing either false positives (harming legitimate entities) or false negatives (allowing illicit actors to evade detection).
• Foreign Threat Identification: Understanding connections between individuals and organizations is crucial in identifying potential security risks and economic threats.
• Resource Allocation: Time-consuming manual processes lead to inefficiencies, diverting skilled analysts from higher-value investigative work.

The Path Forward: Human Expertise + Intelligent Automation

While no single technology can fully replace human judgment, Entity Resolution solutions that integrate seamlessly into agency workflows can empower federal teams to make more informed decisions faster. Automating the tedious aspects of ER—such as deduplication, linking disparate records, and reconciling discrepancies—allows human analysts to focus on deeper investigative work that requires critical thinking and contextual understanding.

The future of Entity Resolution in federal financial missions lies in balancing automation with human expertise, ensuring that agencies can operate with both precision and efficiency. By addressing the challenges of scale, accuracy, and integration, agencies can transform entity resolution from a bottleneck into a powerful enabler of mission success.

The challenges of entity resolution in federal financial oversight are too critical to ignore. Now is the time for agencies to rethink their approach, leveraging automation and human expertise to drive more effective investigations and compliance efforts.

How is your agency tackling the Entity Resolution challenge? Explore Senzing to see if Entity Resolution is a good fit for you.