How the Flemish Government re-imagined subsidy audits with Power Apps and AI Agents

MSDW Insight: The combination of well-scoped agents and traditional Power Platform strengths is helping this government organization address inefficiencies that may have been considered intractable in the past.

Taxpayers expect their money to be spent responsibly. In the case of subsidies granted to non-profit agencies, government auditors serve as a bulwark against fraud and waste. But when auditors are overwhelmed by paperwork, oversight activities slow down and opportunities for bad behavior increase.  

In Belgium, the Flemish Government was keenly aware of these risks, and their VTS team (Verstrengd Toezicht Subsidies, or enhanced subsidy oversight) initiated a project to develop digital tools and processes to support their remit: more effectively auditing government subsidies to various outside organizations. 

Until now, subsidy audits in the Flemish Government have involved a great deal of manual work. Auditors need to gather documents and information from multiple systems. They must then validate invoices, analyze financial data, apply legal frameworks, and prepare reports. The number of audits is limited because of the sheer effort involved. 

Unlike the traditional pattern for audits, the project for VTS, run in partnership between the Flemish Government, their digital agency Digitaal Vlaanderen, Cegeka, and Microsoft has delivered a solution that relies on a collection of AI agents built with Copilot Studio and a custom Power App to compile and structure data, track status, execute audit tasks, and carry out analysis. A human auditor retains control over final decision making. 

“The AI agent is the go-to tool auditors open in the morning [to work with structured data] and the last one they close in the evening,” according to Jo Neetesonne, department manager for Microsoft Power Platform of IT services firm Cegeka. “The agents support the auditors, they don’t replace them entirely. The human is always in the lead, always in command.”

The platform is already delivering significant improvements in efficiency and oversight quality, according to Neetesonne.

“Previously there were so many invoices to check that it was impossible for a team of four to five people to cover them all. It took them 15 minutes to check whether each invoice is legit, and now we check them all with AI in six seconds…To use the analogy of a fishing net, it’s about tightening the mesh of the net so that no fraud gets through.”

Based on historical audit case metrics, Cegeka projects that VTS will result in a societal and financial benefit estimated between €5 million and €10 million through improved oversight and auditing. 

In the initial version of the solution, the organizations subject to oversight send their documents by email, and VTS collects it automatically. Then the solution relies on agents for various activities.