The City of Atlanta Ethics Office reviews thousands of financial disclosures each year to safeguard transparency and public trust. As volume and complexity grew, they partnered with The Canton Group to deploy an automated digital assistant that accelerates audits, improves accuracy, and enables full-coverage oversight.
The City of Atlanta Ethics Office plays a critical role in upholding ethical governance, transparency, and public trust by administering and reviewing annual financial disclosure statements submitted by elected officials, city employees, and board members.
Each year, the office processes nearly 3,000 disclosures to ensure personal and financial interests are properly reported and to identify potential conflicts of interest. However, the review process was entirely manual—requiring weeks of preparation and months of detailed analysis by staff.
Because of the time-intensive, manual nature of this work, the team could review only a portion of submitted disclosures each year. As the Ethics Office sought to strengthen oversight, improve compliance, and increase visibility into financial disclosures, leadership faced a clear challenge: modernize the audit approach to reduce manual effort, improve efficiency, rapidly address errors, and audit 100% of statements.
Meet Genie!
In partnership with The Canton Group, the Atlanta Ethics Office launched Genie, an automated financial disclosure auditing bot built on UiPath and named in honor of Virginia ‘Ginny’ Looney, Atlanta’s first Ethics Officer.
Genie was designed to replicate and enhance the office’s manual review process, automatically analyzing each disclosure for omissions, conflicts, and inconsistencies. This includes identifying discrepancies in reported income, highlighting missing investment information, validating job classifications, and comparing family member transactions—tasks that previously required significant staff time and manual cross-checking.
Using 23 business rules defined by the Ethics Office, Genie reviews every submitted statement with consistency and precision. It also compares each filer’s submission against their prior two years of disclosures, applying multiple identification and matching rules to detect changes, gaps, or potential reporting issues that might otherwise go unnoticed. Any discrepancies between years alert the office of potential changes in filers’ personal and financial interests which may trigger review for conflicts of interest. These automated continuity checks strengthen oversight and help ensure that required information is reported accurately year over year.
Genie provides complete transparency into its work by generating detailed audit trails and three easy-to-understand reports:
- Audit Pass
- Audit Fail
- Audit Summary
These reports clearly identify which statements require further review and which specific rules were triggered, allowing staff to focus their expertise where it is needed most.
Here’s how it works:
Genie was developed through a collaborative, structured approach that combined deep process discovery, detailed solution design, iterative development, and rigorous testing—ensuring the final automation aligned precisely with the Ethics Office’s policies, workflows, and goals.
Benefits
Genie delivered immediate, measurable benefits to the City of Atlanta Ethics Office by enabling full-coverage auditing, eliminating manual preparation, and empowering staff to focus on higher-value investigative work. These benefits can be viewed across three key dimensions: Ethical, Efficient, and Effective.
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Ethical: Strengthening Integrity and Public Trust
Genie applies ethics rules consistently and objectively, ensuring every disclosure is reviewed using the same standards. By systematically enforcing 23 defined business rules, the automation eliminates subjectivity and reduces the risk of human error. Each action Genie performs is documented through a clear, comprehensive audit trail, supporting regulatory compliance and reinforcing public trust in the City’s oversight processes. Because Genie’s rules can be updated as policies or laws evolve, the Ethics Office now has a future-ready tool that ensures ongoing alignment with changing ethics requirements. -
Efficient: Transforming Speed and Scale
What once took weeks of staff preparation and months of manual review can now be completed in seconds. Genie reviews each statement in less than one second, enabling the Ethics Office to audit 100 percent of submitted disclosures without increasing staff workload. The office also eliminated the need to create a tiered review system—previously required because only a portion of statements could be examined. Genie can operate continuously and on demand, performing its work with speed, consistency, and precision, while supporting Atlanta’s broader vision for a modernized ethics infrastructure. -
Effective: Expanding Oversight and Improving Accuracy
With Genie performing the initial audit of every disclosure, staff can now focus their expertise on investigating flagged statements that require deeper review. This shift enables earlier identification and resolution of omissions, inconsistencies, or potential conflicts, improving the overall accuracy and completeness of financial disclosures. As a result, the Ethics Office achieved an 800% expansion in oversight capacity without adding personnel. This dramatic increase in coverage and accuracy provides the public with greater confidence that the City’s ethics program is functioning as intended—protecting both the public interest and the integrity of its officials.
In 2024, the City of Atlanta Ethics Office introduced Genie alongside its existing manual audit process, validating the automation’s performance against experienced auditors. This side-by-side validation confirmed Genie could meet and exceed human review standards while maintaining consistency and accuracy.
With that foundation established, the initial deployment quickly demonstrated measurable impact. Genie expanded the office’s oversight capacity far beyond manual limitations, delivering results at a scale and speed previously unattainable:
The expanded oversight quickly translated into meaningful compliance actions. Genie’s findings led to 29 clarification letters, 10 amended filings, and one referral to the Investigations Team—demonstrating how automation can support staff by increasing capacity and consistency across a high volume of disclosures. These results validated the power of automation and laid the foundation for a fully modernized, comprehensive audit approach.
In 2025, Genie granted the Atlanta Ethics Office's wish of being able to audit 100% of required filers. Key outcomes include:
These results reflect more than efficiency gains—they represent a fundamental shift to proactive, comprehensive oversight that strengthens accountability. Genie has fundamentally transformed what is possible in financial disclosure auditing. From a limited, risk-based sampling model to a comprehensive, full-population review, the Ethics Office has dramatically expanded its oversight capacity without adding staff. The 2025 audit, scheduled for completion in Q1 2026, marks another milestone in this journey.
Today, Genie is embedded as a core component of Atlanta’s ethics infrastructure as a sustainable model of governance that increases public trust in the integrity of City leadership.
Looking Ahead
The Ethics Office plans to expand automation and AI capabilities to support:
- Enhanced ethics advice delivery through chatbot‑style guidance.
- Further refinements to the disclosure process.
- Integration with a redesigned Ethics Office website.
- Broader automation‑supported training and accessibility improvements.
Genie has become a foundational component of Atlanta Ethics Office's innovation strategy, proving that automation strengthens human capability and promotes ethical governance at scale.
The City of Atlanta Ethics Office has been an exceptional partner. Their enthusiasm for adopting new technology, combined with their collaborative spirit and talented team, made this a truly rewarding project for all of us at The Canton Group. We're grateful for the opportunity and look forward to continuing this partnership.
Ryan McCracken, Director of Professional Services
Beyond Automation: Empowering Humans
The goal of RPA isn’t to replace humans—it’s to empower them. Genie shoulders the mundane, repetitive, and time-consuming aspects of financial auditing, allowing Ethics Office analysts to focus on mission-critical work that requires human insight and judgment. With Genie as a digital assistant, the team can pursue more strategic objectives and uphold ethical governance with greater confidence. This project illustrates the transformative power of RPA when thoughtfully implemented as a supportive tool for human teams.
