Identity Resolution Daily

[Post from Infoglide] The Real Test of Identity Resolution

“So the title ‘Catching Terrorists and Making the World a Safer Place’ certainly caught my eye! And the content of the post did not disappoint, as the author Chris Boorman of Informatica did a great job of crystallizing the issue that drove the creation of this blog over two years ago: ‘So how do we balance the freedom of movement we have come to expect as hard-working citizens with the need to spot terrorists?’”

[Post from Infoglide] Identity Resolution Daily on Twitter

“At Identity Resolution Daily, we often come across interesting tidbits about entity resolution, and now we can share them in real time. Just add our ID - @IDResolution - to your twitter sources. Happy tweeting!”

GreenvilleOnline.com: Consumers may see insurance rates rise

“According to Love, the average family spends about $1,000 more per year as a result of insurance fraud. That’s felt in higher insurance premiums, taxes, and the cost of goods and services, she said.”

Ezine: Fraud Alert - Lottery Retailers Win More Than Their Customers Do

“California Lottery did an undercover sting where they brought, what they knew to be, a winning lottery ticket to a retailer to have it verified. They caught many retailers on hidden camera telling them that the winning ticket was a loser and, subsequently, went on to claim the money themselves. On top of that, a statistician studied big wins of lottery retailers in Ontario, Canada and found that retailers won big jackpots a lot more than you would statistically expect them too.”

data quality pro: Rethinking Data Quality: The Need for a Data Quality Profession

“Processes, projects, products – each of these contributes to the efforts to improve data quality. But they haven’t solved the problems individually or collectively. To really make substantial and sustainable differences in the quality of data we need to take a different approach. We need to think of data quality as a profession.”

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By the Infoglide Team

cnet news: Dragging health records into the Digital Age

“The Obama stimulus package provides $19 billion for hospital technology efforts, which could go a long way toward prodding penny-pinching hospitals and doctors to finally leap into the 21st century.”

FederalComputerWeek: GAO: Secure Flight improved IT security

“The GAO said the TSA since January has corrected deficiencies in information security. By March 20, the TSA had fixed all 60 high- and moderate-risk information security vulnerabilities associated with the final version of Secure Flight, the report states.”

Whittier Daily News: Two La Habra Heights residents charged with workers compensation fraud

“Kimberly Jane Soares, 43, and her husband, Joseph Perry Soares, 47, both of La Habra Heights, and two others were charged with committing more than $12 million in tax and workers compensation insurance fraud for their demolition company, Democo Corp. of Orange.”

Iowa Politics:   Iowa Lottery: All prizes properly paid

“In 2008, the lottery instituted two other security enhancements, requiring that tickets be signed on the back before they can be checked or cashed; and that receipts be printed for all lotto and instant-scratch tickets that are checked or cashed.”

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[Post from Infoglide] The Growing Role of Identity Resolution in MDM

“There definitely seems to be a trend lately with small companies in the master data management (MDM) and data quality space being purchased (as in the asset acquisition of Exeros by IBM) or partnering with larger firms (such as Silver Creek Systems’ OEM relationship with Oracle).”

The CotoBlogzz: Four Charged With $12+ Million Tax Fraud

“In order to maintain insurance coverage, SCIF requires an annual audit of insured businesses. The defendants are accused of refusing to allow these annual audits, resulting in cancelation of their insurance policy. Over the course of eight years, the defendants are accused of opening eight policies with SCIF using different business names for Democo in order to avoid the audits.”

BeyeNETWORK: Mastering Data Management in Health and Life Sciences

“Think of MDM as a way to manage reference data so that it can help us understand the context of our transactions. Using Ralph Kimball’s terminology, MDM helps us contextualize our facts with dimensions. MDM helps us by providing processes for how we collect, summarize and cleanse our data to ensure consistency and appropriate governance in the ongoing maintenance and use of this data.”

Arkansas News: Arkansas lottery retailers to be policed for fraud, officials say

“Dateline NBC reported recently that insider wins are common in the U.S. as well. According to the report, individual retailers in California, New Jersey and New York have cashed in hundreds of tickets apiece for winnings ranging from $160,000 to $500,000. In Illinois, four employees at one store and five of their relatives cashed 556 tickets for more than $1.6 million.”

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[Post from Infoglide] Lottery Fraud by Retailers Is an Identity Resolution Problem

“Lottery Post ran a piece last week on suspicious winnings in the North Carolina Lottery. It seems a regular lottery player contacted NBC affiliate WCNC in Charlotte about a pattern of winnings that seemed unlikely. The station’s investigators used the Open Records Act to obtain information from the lottery and subsequently uncovered that ‘of the lottery retailers winning prizes, some are amassing significant jackpots repeatedly — $100,000, $300,000, and $500,000 prizes — dozens of times a year.’”

Orange County Register: How did $38 million scheme work?

“Just as auto insurance rises for drivers with poor records, individual companies reporting high injury rates can see their premiums soar. When workers’ comp rates peaked earlier this decade, premiums in the construction industry were sometimes double or triple the payroll. A key factor behind the high rates was fraud: Employers under-reported the number of insured workers to reduce their payments, thereby driving up premiums for the industry which looked like it had a high accident rate for a small pool of workers.”

Travel Management: Industry Prepares For Secure Flight Implementation

“‘Meanwhile, many corporate travel agencies–from the largest mega travel management companies to smaller entities–have been working to adapt their agent scripts and booking tools to include required Secure Flight data collection, and their profile systems to help reconcile name discrepancies. We have undertaken a large update and enhancement of our internal profile systems to accommodate the storage of this very valuable and confidential information,’ according to Robert Polk, CEO of Polk Majestic Travel Group in Denver.”

Greensboro News & Record: Editorial: Luck has its limits

“It’s happened in other states. In March, Minnesota lottery investigators charged five retailers and three accomplices with fraud after an undercover sting operation found them allegedly trying to cash customers’ winning tickets for themselves. California launched a series of sting operations last year, which resulted in charges against retailers in several cities. In Iowa last month, the state ombudsman reported that lottery officials don’t adequately protect customers from fraud and theft by retailers.”

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By Robert Barker, Infoglide Senior VP & Chief Marketing Officer

Lottery Post ran a piece last week on suspicious winnings in the North Carolina Lottery. It seems a regular lottery player contacted NBC affiliate WCNC in Charlotte about a pattern of winnings that seemed unlikely. The station’s investigators used the Open Records Act to obtain information from the lottery and subsequently uncovered that “of the lottery retailers winning prizes, some are amassing significant jackpots repeatedly — $100,000, $300,000, and $500,000 prizes — dozens of times a year.”

The problem isn’t restricted to a single state, and similar problems have been reported in Canada as well. Dateline NBC did a complete show on lottery fraud a few days ago that presented a clear understanding of how the fraud works. The video you’re about to watch starts with one fraud victim’s story and then explains how the crooked retailers are apprehended and just how widespread the problem is becoming.

(Excerpted from Dateline NBC – all rights reserved by the National Broadcasting Corporation)

The danger for the lotteries themselves is that the number of consumers feeling at risk about being paid on a winning ticket could reach a tipping point. An affected lottery could see a substantial decrease in revenue almost overnight, and it’s difficult to predict when that tipping point will be reached.

The good news is that identity resolution technology can help solve the problem. For lotteries maintaining any kind of information on participating retailers, identity resolution combats the fraud by identifying non-obvious connections between retail employees and the people making the claims. Going beyond simple householding, identity resolution can find second and third level connections and can provide the forensic trail needed to prosecute the fraudsters.

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By the Infoglide Team

NBC Dateline Video: Investigation into lottery fraud by retailers

“So how common are discounting and theft in other state lotteries? There’s no way to know because few states have investigative arms like the one we saw in California.”

ClaimsJournal.com: Father, Daughter Arrested for Workers’ Comp Insurance Premium Fraud

“The Haases allegedly underreported their companies’ payrolls from October 1, 2003, through February 11, 2008, to avoid paying $1,028,640 in premiums to State Compensation Insurance Fund (SCIF), Virginia Surety Co., and Reinsurance Corporation of America, the California Department of Insurance reported.”

Lottery Post: N.C. lottery store owners, employees winning big and often

“Buried in thousands of records of winners are other retailers — store owners winning $100,000 $300,000 and almost $500,000. And the reports show multiple winners. One employee of a store selling tickets in eastern North Carolina won 10 times in a little over a year — including a $100,000 jackpot.”

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[Post from Infoglide] Solving the False Negative Problem

“In my March 25, 2009 post “The Myth of Matching,” I discussed the confusion between entity resolution and matching as in record de-duplication.  Matching is a necessary part of entity resolution, but it is not sufficient.”

Semantic Web Company: Chris Bizer: Within the corporate market, there is interest in using Linked Data as a lightweight, pay-as-you-go data integration technology

“‘I think we will see a growing number of applications that use data from the public Web as background knowledge to offer better search capabilities and to augment local content with additional content from the Web of Data.’”

TheStreet.com: Ombudsman: Iowa Lottery should focus on fraud

“‘Many of these were the types of cases where the lottery investigator would need to ‘make the case,’ ‘ the report said. ‘Most of the time they didn’t even try.’ The report also said that even when the lottery discovered cases of fraud or theft by retailers, the retailer wasn’t held accountable.”

Security Management: Fusion Center Dialogue Continues

“We don’t have to choose between security and liberty. In order to be effective, intelligence activities need to be narrowly focused on real threats, tightly regulated and closely monitored.”

data quality pro: Expert Interview With Dan Power of Hub Solution Designs Inc.

“Sometimes, the business comes forward and says “we’ve got to have the single view of the customer”. Sometimes, IT sees it as a way to become more agile and to reduce system maintenance costs. It is pretty clear, though, that MDM initiatives are more likely to succeed when they’re driven by the business, even if it may have been originally initiated by IT.”

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This post is based on a March 31 interview with Infoglide Senior Vice President Douglas Wood by Linda L. Briggs for TDWI (The Data Warehousing Institute), March 31, 2009. Click here to read the entire interview.

In a comprehensive discussion, Doug Wood of Infoglide Software spoke about an area of confusion that exists when people discuss identity resolution. He pointed out that the term is sometimes misapplied to describe software that performs data matching alone.

[An identity resolution engine is] software that allows organizations to connect disparate data sources in order to understand possible entity matches and non-obvious relationships. It boils down to this: Providing capabilities for organizations to understand “who’s who” and “who knows whom” across multiple data silos. Occasionally, when we introduce the concept of identity resolution technology to a new customer, their immediate response is “I see, but we already have a data matching engine.” The truth is, identity resolution engines have data matching at the core, but [they] provide much more functionality and flexibility than that.

So if identity resolution incorporates data matching, what really differentiates it from data matching products?

Perhaps the key element of an identity resolution engine is the ability to take the entity match and relationship results, then apply domain-specific rules to them. How does the enterprise treat Customer A by virtue of the fact that he or she has some non-obvious relationship with Customer B? The answer to that question is specific to the domain.

Most of us are familiar with the use of data matching for removing duplicates from databases and in cleansing input for data warehouses and master data management, but identity resolution is used in unique ways.

With identity resolution technology, data isn’t subjected to deterioration processes such as cleansing or record merging. Rather, the data can remain in its original state and in its original location.

What this means is that identity resolution is especially adept at uncovering risk, fraud, and conflicts of interest since the “forensic value of individual records is preserved for ongoing analysis.” While government is a key market for identity resolution engines, a growing number of commercial applications are emerging in financial services (e.g., PATRIOT Act compliance, detection of loan fraud and credit card fraud), retail (e.g., uncovering organized retail crime activities by comparing shoplifters with employees or frequent merchandise returners), workers compensation (e.g., finding employers that change attributes to avoid paying premiums), lottery corporations (e.g., compare winning ticket holders against lottery retail employees to discover potential fraud), and customer relationship management (e.g., keeping two similar records unmerged until birth date attribute uncovers a father/son relationship).

What prevents traditional data matching products from addressing these problems?

There are no problems with matching engines per se. They just aren’t identity resolution engines. Matching engines typically use one or two algorithms, perhaps mathematical in nature, that examine structured data looking for name matches. They provide an improvement over Soundex, but little more. What they do is say “Yes, this is a match” or “No, this is not a match.”

Common requirements for solving identity resolution problems include connecting to more diverse data types and formats, handling higher volumes, and delivering deeper insight into non-obvious relationships from existing uncleansed data sources.

If identity resolution engines have existed for years, what has caused the recent rush to employ them?

As part of the 9/11 Commission recommendations, the Department of Homeland Security began a robust search for identity resolution technology that could keep terrorists off airplanes by comparing passenger attributes against terrorist watch lists, no-fly lists, and other types of threat-related data. Through a few iterations, the selection and implementation process evolved into the Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) Secure Flight Program, which ultimately thrust identity resolution technology into the limelight. Secure Flight is now widely recognized as the pre-eminent use case for identity resolution technology requirements today, and a number of companies are involved in delivering that solution.

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By the Infoglide Team

data quality PRO: Identifying Duplicate Customers (Part 1)

[Jim Harris] “What is sometimes overlooked is that although technology provides the solution, what is being solved is a business problem. Technology sometimes carries with it a dangerous conceit – that what works in the laboratory and the engineering department will work in the board room and the accounting department, that what is true for the mathematician and the computer scientist will be true for the business analyst and the data steward.”

Correction Officers Going Wrong: California Correctional Officer Arrested for Fraud

“Each insurance fraud count carries up to five years in state prison. Also, California workers’ compensation fraud statutes require restitution of double the monetary amount of the fraud; the suspected loss on this case is more than $150,000, not including more than $1.6 million in disability retirement from the California Public Employee Retirement System (CalPERS) that would have been paid out on this suspect claim.”

TwinCities.com: What if your lottery sales clerk said your ticket was a loser … and lied?

“‘(We) really need our retailers to be honest and to have their employees do it right every time,’ said state lottery director Clint Harris. The stings took place last December and January at 186 randomly selected metro stores, Harris said. Undercover agents would ask clerks to verify the specially constructed crossword game scratch-offs as winners. The prizes ranged from $7,000 to $21,000.”

Register Herald: Fusion center helps fight war on crime

“Kirk is handling a new mission in life, directing West Virginia’s fledgling fusion center, a new tack in the war on terrorism and crime in general. Put simply, it acts as a clearinghouse so data can be analyzed and the proper law enforcement agency put on notice for immediate, or long-range, investigations.”

Dashboard INSIGHT: The increasing convergence of MDM and data governance

“The concept of data governance is simple.  The Data Governance Institute (datagovernance.com) defines it as ‘a system of decision rights and accountabilities for information-related processes, executed according to agreed-upon models which describe who can take what actions with what information, and when, under what circumstances, using what methods.’”

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[Post from Infoglide] Entity Resolution: How to Catch a Dummy

“Sometimes you just have to sit back and marvel at the lengths some people will go to keep from doing the right thing and paying their workers compensation premiums!”

KCBS: 9 Arrested in South Bay Lottery Fraud

“Investigators posing as customers handed clerks decoy winning tickets and asked if they had won. In some instances, the clerks told the investigators that their ticket was not a winner. The suspects then went on to file a claim with the Lottery as if the winning tickets were theirs, said Lottery spokesman Alex Traverso.”

Master Data Management Blog: MDM Vendors

“With companies growing larger and the proper storage and use of data becoming more and more critical, development of master data management solutions and products is increasing at an ever-quickening pace.”

WorkersCompensation.com: “Most Wanted” Check-Casher In Custody

“‘Workers’ comp. fraud is a crime of opportunity that, in some cases, accompanies other criminal activity. It is not to be taken lightly,’ NYSIF Executive Director David P. Wehner said.”

Silicon.com: Who’s looking after your data?

“The survey of IT decision makers at large financial services companies revealed a degree of confusion in the industry over data handling. Eighteen per cent of respondents said they either didn’t check potential customers against criminal lists, or didn’t know whether such checks took place even though existing regulation requires it.”

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