U.S. Department of Agriculture

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Risk Management Agency (RMA) saved taxpayers millions with Teradata technology, including a Teradata Warehouse and advanced data mining by beefing up proactive efforts against waste, fraud and abuse.

The Agriculture Risk Protection Act of 2000 required the USDA to work together with 17 crop insurance providers to improve program compliance and integrity through the use of data mining technology. The USDA's existing crop insurance database was designed for accounting, not data mining. Data was stored in annual data marts, making it almost impossible to perform multi-year data analysis to find or prevent abuse and waste.

Today, the USDA has a Teradata Warehouse and data mining facility that holds data on every policy sold under the program since 1991. Investigators can retrieve, process and analyze information on about one million producers and 12 million policies, with results in under 15 minutes. The solution saved more than $241 million in just three years.