Document Verification System

The Department for Social Prosperity (DPS) is an agency of the Colombian Government responsible for implementing policies, general plans, programs, and projects to provide assistance, care, and reparation to victims of violence, social inclusion, and attention to vulnerable groups, and their social and economic reintegration. One of its strategic objectives is to articulate and manage the social offering addressed to households and communities' social and productive inclusion.

As of 2020, DPS is in charge of managing all State contributions, in the form of direct subsidies and conditional and unconditional monetary subsidies, to the disadvantaged population. This decision to unify all money transfers in a single entity seeks greater efficiency in providing services, improved household identification and targeting, and enhanced delivery of resources.

With this change, the entity began a digital transformation process to modernize processes such as information matching in stages such as enrollment, verification of commitments, and management of new developments. This process must verify the quality and authenticity of the supporting documents submitted in such stages. Since it is an operational-consuming task, we want to adapt it using new technologies such as AI.

Problem to be solved

Document verification is a manual process with a high operational burden for field and headquarters staff, who cross-check information from multiple databases.

Populations affected by the problem

Users of DPS social programs: Jóvenes en Acción, the pilot program, and officials responsible for the document verification process.

The current response to this problem, considering the related institutions

Document verification is a manual process: once documents are received, information is cross-checked with the lists of potential beneficiaries, beneficiaries, and internal and external databases and information sources available in the DPS data lake.

Proposal to solve the problem using AI

To design and implement algorithms and components allowing the verification of documents provided during the commitments verification processes and/or management of new developments for the Jóvenes en Acción program.

What security considerations, national laws, or standards should be considered to use each source of information?

ISO 27001:2013 and ISO 27018:2019 technical standard, Law 1581 of 2012 that sets out general provisions for the protection of personal data, and Resolution 1519 of 2020 of the Ministry of Information Technology and Communications that defines the requirements for access to public information, web accessibility, digital security, and open data.

Progress/results to May 2022

The solution's scope and viability were defined after conducting feasibility and design workshops.

The Terms of Reference for contracting the development of the AI solution defined.

Selection of developing firm after carrying out a tendering process.

Goals for 2022-II

Complete the development and validation of the document verification AI solution.