Problem background
The Fraud Investigation department at Tax office oversees programs to protect its individual’s privacy, their finance related information, and security of all the data collected regarding the fraud. The department is responsible for investigating and prosecuting individual for any convictions made and collect personal data and process it for law enforcement activities and joint investigation with external recipients. The personal data may be disclosed with Other law enforcement agencies, Government departments, court, counsel , financial institutions and regulatory bodies for compliance and statutory duties. The data shared with external agencies may contain confidential information and personal data, which must be redacted before being released to the public or media in case of any public interest. The challenge is maintaining the worker's confidentiality and ensuring that any sensitive information is not released to the public.
Problem Statement
Given the limited budgets and staff available in the office, the investigation department is searching for more efficient ways to respond to public records requests, specifically regarding the redaction of sensitive information from the documents, which could range from a few pages to over 20,000 pages. To redact public records, the department's workers rely on the electronic tool to safely remove private information and sensitive content and require redaction from various document types, including PDF, TIFF and Microsoft® Word and Microsoft® Excel®.
Solution Assessment
Due to the high demand for public records from various sources, the department faced a challenge in manually redacting sensitive information from the records. This task was not only time-consuming but also resulted in an excessive amount of paper. The department is required to comply with strict privacy regulations, including GDPR and Privacy Act laws, to protect the confidentiality of the information contained in the records.
Solution
Coforge has developed a Redaction solution with OpenText™ Brava!™. The tool offers several features that improve the efficiency and accuracy of the redaction process. Coforge has configured Brava to achieve the following features.
- Redact all instances of sensitive information, such as names, social security numbers, birthdates, phone numbers, account numbers, Etc, from the documents and store the redacted copy alongside the original document for easy tracking and reference.
- We created redaction templates to redact predefined block-out zones from the documents created using standard document forms.
- The workers were given multiple ways to apply redactions, including dragging a box, searching for text strings or patterns, or using reusable scripts to help speed up their work when dealing multiple page documents.
- The solution is supported with OpenText Intelligent capture product for OCR to perform optical character recognition on TIFF documents to support redaction based on text.
- The redacted files will contain no hidden text or metadata which complies with the data privacy act or GDPR requirements for data storage and archiving.
Conclusion
The Coforge Redaction solution using OpenText Brava! has improved the department's efficiency in the redaction process, as it saves much time compared to the manual redaction process. The software is also neater, cleaner, and helps in staying organized. In addition, the OCR add-on and the ability to apply scripts make the redaction process even faster and more efficient. The solution has made it easier for the department to redact confidential information before releasing public records. With its easy-to-use features, such as the ability to redact all instances of sensitive information, create redaction templates, and verify redactions, the analyst has fully adopted the solution and has no intention of returning to the manual redaction process.
