City of San Antonio · Government · San Antonio, TX · 16 weeks
Municipal data quality program established across 12 departments
The City of San Antonio faced data quality issues across 12 departments that threatened $4.1 million in federal grant funding. We developed and implemented a targeted data quality program that fixed the errors and set up continuous monitoring to safeguard their funding moving forward.
Challenge
A federal audit found serious data quality issues in grant reports from 12 city departments. The problems included inconsistent beneficiary counts, missing outcome metrics, and duplicate service records. The city faced a 90-day deadline to fix these errors or lose $4.1 million in federal funding.
Approach
In the first two weeks, we assessed all 12 departments, focusing on those with the highest funding risk. We created tailored remediation plans for each department and implemented a centralized data quality monitoring system to track compliance with federal reporting requirements in real time.
Outcome
We helped all 12 departments pass the federal re-audit, securing $4.1M in grant funding. We built a data quality monitoring platform that continuously checks compliance with federal reporting rules and sends automated alerts if any department’s data drops below the required standards.
Figuring Out Which Accounts Are Really at Funding Risk
Twelve departments were dealing with shaky funding. We focused first on the top three, since they controlled $8.4M of the $12M that was at risk. Sorting out their problems quickly meant we secured most of the city’s funding right away. After that, we moved on to the other nine departments.
We spotted duplicate service records throwing off the data. So, we rolled up our sleeves and cleaned it up.
Here’s what we saw: 8 of the 12 departments had a mess of duplicate service records. Their intake systems weren’t lining up IDs properly. So, we built a nightly deduplication pipeline tailored for each team. Every night, it scrubbed out duplicates and gave us clean, reliable beneficiary counts without fail.
We put nonstop monitoring in place so we’d spot problems long before they turned into big headaches.
Every night, we kick off 80 automated data checks to make sure everything lines up with federal reporting rules. If any department’s data slips up, our data coordinator gets a quick alert showing exactly which records need fixing. No fuss, just clear and simple.
Results
- $4.1M Federal grant funding preserved
- 12 Departments remediated
- 90 days Remediation completed on time
- 0 Deficiencies in re-audit
We had just 90 days to fix problems across 12 departments or we’d lose $4.1 million in federal funding. Thinklytics helped us zero in on the biggest risks first, and we passed the re-audit without any problems.