Virginia Employment Commission - IP Blocking
Business Case
The mission of the VEC is to promote economic growth and stability by delivering and coordinating workforce services throughout the Commonwealth. Among other services, VEC is responsible for providing temporary income support to citizens. The VEC Online Unemployment Insurance (UI) Claims Service (the Service) serves a vital role in VEC’s ability to perform this task.
The Service did not however, filter claim attempts initiated from foreign Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. Based on analysis conducted by other states and results from similar implementations, it can be reasonably assumed that a considerable number of claimants were certifying their claim requests from outside of the Unites States. Successful certifications made from foreign countries can result in improper payments to ineligible claimants.
By enhancing the Service to block claims from being made from foreign IP addresses (outside of the U.S. and U.S. territories), VEC expects to see a significant reduction in improper payments potentially saving millions of dollars over time. Tracking blocked claim attempts can also assist the agency with fraud investigation.
Solution
VEC worked together with Virginia Interactive (VI) to enhance and update the Online UI Claims Service to help prevent applicants from submitting claims from outside of the United States.
As recommended by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, VI hosts IP2LocationTM database information to match and block foreign IP addresses during incoming claim requests. IP blocking was implemented for both the initial and weekly UI Claims requests but does not prevent users from logging in to perform other tasks such as resetting their passwords or updating their email address. Allowing users to login helps the agency to log a record of the user making a fraudulent attempt which may be necessary for further investigation and cross checking other user activities.
Tools
- IP2Location.com Foreign IP address database services
- Oracle 11G Enterprise Edition 11.2 – 64bit
- Uses SFTP (Secure File Transfer Protocol) for data updates
- Linux environment hosted in a secure tier 4 data center with redundant co-location and failover
Results
- Launched in November, 2015, the service logged over 1,200 logins from disallowed locations and blocked over 1,500 initial and weekly claims made from outside of the United States and U.S. Territories in the first month.
- VEC anticipates the resulting fraud cases from these foreign-filed claims to spur a significant increase the number of closed cases over prior years.
- Since the IP blocking enhancement is a preventive measure, VEC also anticipates that a significant amount of improper payments will be avoided annually resulting in substantial cost savings for the Commonwealth.