Identity Resolution Daily

By the Infoglide Software Team

The Economist: Data, data everywhere

“By 2013 the amount of traffic flowing over the internet annually will reach 667 exabytes, according to Cisco, a maker of communications gear. And the quantity of data continues to grow faster than the ability of the network to carry it all.”

Financial Fraud Law: Fed’s 2010 Health Care Fraud Recovery: $4 Billion

“The federal government pointed to the expansion of Medicare Fraud Strike Force teams as one reason for the increased recovery. In FY 2010, the total number of cities with strike force prosecution teams was increased to seven, all of which have teams of investigators and prosecutors dedicated to fighting fraud.  The strike force teams use advanced data analysis techniques to identify high-billing levels in health care fraud hot spots so that interagency teams can target emerging or migrating schemes along with chronic fraud by criminals masquerading as health care providers or suppliers.”

Gartner: 10 Critical Myths and Realities of Master Data Management

“MDM is the latest attempt to solve the old problem of inconsistent versions of important data at the centre of an organization,” said Andrew White, research vice president at Gartner. “As with any new initiative, there is a lot of hype and confusion, and with hype and confusion comes misunderstanding. Executive sponsors of MDM and MDM program managers must avoid several common mistakes that have been known to derail MDM initiatives in the past.”

TechWorld: Cloud Computing: How big is big data? IDC’s answer

“The report notes that by 2020, much of this data will be held in cloud environments or will be “touched by cloud,” which means data that transits through a cloud service or is temporarily held in a cloud application. The report estimates that perhaps 15% of all data will be held in the cloud, and that around one-third will live in or pass through the cloud.”

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[Post from Infoglide] Big Data and Entity Resolution

“Early this year, Gartner suggested that a ‘data deluge’ has begun. In his recent Dataspora Blog post about ‘Big Data’ and what it means, author Michael Driscoll presents a unique and interesting perspective on the massive amounts of data being generated and stored. According to The 451 Group’s definition…”

Mastering Data Management: Entity Resolution & MDM: Interchangeable?

“Gartner released a report in November entitled, ‘Top 10 Technology Trends Impacting Information Infrastructure, 2011.’ Two of the top ten trends were ‘Entity Resolution and Analysis’ and ‘Master Data Management.’”

KeysNet.com: Keys whistleblowers awarded $88 Million

“According to Taxpayers Against Fraud, a nonprofit group based in Washington, D.C., National Medical then launched a campaign to force Ven-A-Care out of business. But in fighting back, Ven-A-Care staff discovered National Medical was paying kickbacks to doctors who prescribed medicines and services that weren’t needed, then billing Medicare and Medicaid exorbitant sums far in excess of what the medicines and services cost. The Justice Department eventually got a $486 million settlement from National Medical — and Ven-A-Care received $40 million as its reward under the False Claims Act.”

Yahoo News: Russian Banks Report $3.8 Trillion in Suspicious Transactions This Year

“Russian financial institutions reported 120 trillion roubles (2.44 trillion pounds) of suspicious transactions to the anti-money laundering watchdog in the first nine months of 2010, the Kommersant daily reported on Monday.”

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By the Infoglide Software Team

ZDNet: Big Data for the year ahead: 10 predictions

“The era of Big Data has only just begun.  In the latest edition of Database Trends & Applications, I provided a series of predictions about the year ahead, with an emphasis on data management. Here are 10 of them…”

InfoWorld: The spectacular rise of SaaS

“The segment of the cloud Salesforce leads, SaaS (software as a service), has grown from a tiny sliver of the enterprise software market just a few years ago to 10 percent in 2009, according to Gartner, which predicts that slice will expand to 16 percent by 2014. Even more dramatic is the firm’s projection that 85 percent of all new software will be delivered as a service by 2010.”

The Huffington Post: Don’t Repeat the UK’s Electronic Health Records Failure

“In 2005 the United Kingdom embarked on the largest investment ($18 billion) in health information technology in the world. Yet despite expectations that the system would increase efficiency and reduce medical errors, their efforts neither improved health nor saved money — in fact in some cases, they may have led to patient harm. Britain’s government-run medical system is obviously different from our complex public-private insurance system.”

CNN.com: Aviation security: Where do we stand?

“‘This is where Secure Flight, the government-run program that is now vetting passengers before they receive their boarding passes, comes in. It replaces a more ad hoc system run by the carriers. ‘Prior to Secure Flight, the airlines themselves were responsible for matching all of their passengers against the watch lists, so each airline had their own system for doing that,’ said Greg Soule, a spokesman for the Transportation Security Administration. ‘Secure Flight takes the passenger watch list matching process away from the airlines and puts it all in one program under TSA, so it is a more consistent process across the board.’”

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By the Infoglide Team

Main Justice:Eric Holder’s Prepared Remarks at Health Care Fraud Prevention Summit

“In just the last fiscal year, we obtained settlements and judgments of more than $2.5 billion in False Claims Act matters alleging health care fraud. This marked a new record – and an increase of more than 60 percent from fiscal year 2009. We also opened more than 2,000 new criminal and civil health-care fraud investigations, reached an all-time high in the number of health-care fraud defendants charged, stopped numerous large-scale fraud schemes in their tracks, and returned more than $2.5 billion to the Medicare Trust Fund and more than $800 million to cash-strapped state Medicaid programs.”

SearchDataManagement.com: Gartner Magic Quadrant ranks MDM software vendors

“Gartner reports that due to the sluggish economy, customer demand for MDM software is growing at a significantly slower rate than years past. But it is growing. The analyst firm predicts that the overall market for MDM software will increase from $1 billion in 2008 to $2.9 billion by 2013. Gartner also predicts that by 2010, investments in MDM software will lead to an 80% reduction in costs associated with managing redundant data.”

The Crime Report: Fusion Centers Could Face Budget Issues As States Cut Back

“Some of the nation’s 72 fusion centers–where federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies share data on terrorism and crime threats–may face budget problems in the nation’s tough economic conditions. Ross Ashley of the National Fusion Center Association, which represents the centers, says that some newly elected governors must be convinced of the centers’ worth. The agencies typically do not have line-item budgets and are dependent on allocations from various levels of government to operate.”

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By the Infoglide Staff

Ottawa Sun: Gang boss gets HSBC credit card for false alias

“Federal laws require banks to know who exactly they’re doing business with - identification checks are mandatory - and they must gather details of clients’ backgrounds and lives. Failure to comply with those regulations can lead to administrative and criminal charges. Banks and other businesses that handle cash also are required to report suspicious transactions involving their clients to a federal anti-money laundering agency, FINTRAC. Reporting failures can also lead to administrative penalties and criminal charges.”

Pharmalot: Healthcare Fraud, Whistleblowers & US Treasury

“Specifically, there were 145 FCA cases settled in the 2010 fiscal year and the 10 largest settlements involved health care fraud, with eight involving drugmakers, according to Taxpayers Against Fraud, a non-profit that supports whistleblower lawsuits. The 10 largest cases accounted for $2.7 billion recovered. Although fiscal year 2009 actually recovered a larger pot of money - $5.6 billion.”

Rob Karel’s Blog: Software AG buys Data Foundations: Business Acumen Meets Data Competency

“It’s no longer too scandalous or surprising to admit that technology- or IT-centric MDM strategies just don’t work.  Building a single version of truth of master data in a central hub somewhere doesn’t directly solve any business problems. The only way master data can reduce risks, improve operational efficiencies, reduce costs, increase revenue or strategically differentiate an organization is by figuring out how to connect and synchronize that master data into the business processes and decisions most important to an organization’s success.”

ctv.ca: Search continues for true stolen lotto prize winner

“Police believe the real winner is a frequent player who purchased the ticket at a favourite store in St. Catharines in 2003, then had it checked at a Burlington store. Back at that time, there was no scanner allowing players to have their tickets checked automatically. They had to trust the clerk. Police have alleged the store’s operators lied to the customer and passed the winning ticket to a female relative to cash in.”

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[Post from Infoglide] Reference Linking Methods - Part 4

“In the direct matching, transitive linking, and association analysis methods discussed in previous posts, the evidence for establishing a link comes from the references themselves, either as attribute values or relationships with other references.  A link created in this way is also called an inferred link. But in almost any ER context, some pairs of equivalent references (i.e. that refer to the same entity) will have insufficient evidence available in the references themselves to make that determination, thereby leaving them as unlinked false negatives.”

Liliendahl on Data Quality: Out of Facebook

“Doing ‘Social Master Data Management’ will become an integrated part of customer master data management offering both opportunities for approaching a ’single version of the truth’ and some challenges in doing so. Of course privacy is a big issue.”

CRN: SMB Cloud Spending To Approach $100 Billion By 2014

“Total cloud-related information and communications technology spending among SMBs globally surpassed $52 billion in 2009, representing just 6 percent of total worldwide SMB ICT spending. But AMI predicts that that will nearly double over a five-year period.”

Media Newswire: Owner of illegal money transmitting business sentenced to 2 years in prison, ordered to forfeit $690K

“According to court documents, between Jan. 1, 2004 and Dec. 31, 2008, Lemine, owner of Sorrento Grocery in Sorrento, Fla., cashed more than $4 million in checks from a local construction company in return for a fee of between 1 and 1.5 percent of the checks’ face value. He did so knowing that the owners of the construction company were attempting by cashing the checks through the grocery to conceal their employment of illegal aliens, avoid paying worker’s compensation and employment taxes, and hide income from state and federal tax officials.”

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[Post from Infoglide] The Talk of the ACFE Conference

“The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) held its annual conference and exhibition in Washington, DC this week.  Through the keynote address and the plethora of wonderful speakers, one message became loud and clear - fraudsters are becoming more and more creative in finding ways to circumvent your policies…”

A Software Insider’s Point of View: Research Report: Rethink Your Next Generation Business Intelligence Strategy

“A confluence of changing business requirements and on-going vendor consolidation leads many organizations to rethink their business intelligence (BI) strategies… Ensure the systems supports multi-channel heterogeneous data sources.  Do not stay dependent on ERP systems for primary sources of data.  Expect a rapidly changing business environment that rewards flexibility.”

Center for Investigative Reporting: Ex-cop says makers of data-mining software must recognize intel rules

“The idea is for police in your area to better share essential information about possible criminal and terrorist threats with their federal counterparts, poor communication being one of the reasons why the terrorist hijackings were allowed to occur in the first place. Civil libertarians have repeatedly expressed concern that the centers are stockpiling too much personal data about Americans who haven’t committed a crime in the hope that some piece of it can be ‘fused’ with another to unravel a terrorist plot. Serrao and his colleagues counter that organizations like the ACLU ‘have no clue’ what’s actually being collected and analyzed at fusion centers.”

Visible IT: Numbers, Names, and User IDs

“Patrick rightly notes that, by definition, how a person spells his name is the correct way to spell it and by definition does not have ‘invalid characters’. It’s perhaps more correct to say that the computer system can’t handle the way a person represents their name. There are extreme cases of course such as TAFKAP and Wolfe+585, where people deliberately try to sabotage Our Modern World with unpronounceable or uncontainable names. But sometimes even the most benign names can cause computer systems fits.”

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By the Infoglide Team

CNSNews.com: New Regulations Outline Content, Transmission Standards for Every Americans’ Electronic Health Records

“The EHRs are designed to be digital replications of the hard-copy, paper health records commonly in use today. They are also engineered to be easily transferable among different doctors and hospitals so as to eliminate the creation of duplicate or disparate records among different health care providers, thus allowing any health care office to access a patient’s complete medical record at each visit.”

Washington Post: Firms slow to embrace cloud computing

“‘There’s an awful lot of talk about it and there is consumption of cloud,’ said Al Gillen, an analyst at IDC. But ‘organizations don’t simply make change because they can. There has to be good justification.’ Harry Weller, a general partner at New Enterprise Associates, said start-ups and new businesses will likely be among the first to move to the cloud. A need to hold down costs is often an overriding factor in their decision, he said.”

Detroit Free Press: Arrests made for Medicare fraud

“Many of the charges involved home health care companies that billed Medicare for equipment or treatment that many patients didn’t need or never received. In several cases, people who worked for the companies were paid to recruit patients to participate in the scheme. Some persuaded elderly people to sell their Medicare identification numbers, which were used to rip off the system.”

Liliendahl on Data Quality: Data Quality is an Ingredient, not an Entrée

“Fortunately it is more and more recognized that you don’t get success with Business Intelligence, Customer Relationship Management, Master Data Management, Service Oriented Architecture and many more disciplines without starting with improving your data quality. But it will be a big mistake to see Data Quality improvement as an entrée before the main course being BI, CRM, MDM, SOA or whatever is on the menu.”

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By the Infoglide Team

Information Management: 10 Key Trends In MDM

“During 2010, independent/standalone data quality vendors (Clavis, Pitney Bowes, Human Inference and Trillium) will focus on name and address cleansing as they struggle against better-funded match/merge and data profiling capabilities increasingly integrated with megavendor MDM. Also at this time, a dearth of non-aligned matching algorithms (such as those from Digital Trowel, Infoglide, Omikron and Uniserve) will engender ‘algorithm envy’ among disenfranchised MDM providers.”

NewCityPatch: Legislator: Rockland Should Review Medicaid Spending

“Rockland County Legislator Ed Day, R-New City, has called for a review of Medicaid spending by the county that would also determine whether enough is being done to prevent and detect Medicaid fraud. ‘Medicaid expenditures represent an amount that is 110 percent of all the property taxes collected here in Rockland,’ said Day.”

Canadian Immigration: Canada should improve its AML efforts according to US report

“The most significant area of concern is organized crime. Canadian Security Intelligence Service estimates that there are about 750 organized crime groups operating in Canada and 80% of them are involved in the illicit drug trade. The cross-border movement of currency was identified as a continued concern.”

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By the Infoglide Team

Media Health Leaders Media: Detroit Doc Gets Six Years for Medicare Fraud

“Myint, of Bloomfield Hills, MI, was also ordered to pay more than $3.1 million in restitution, jointly with co-defendants, and to serve two years of supervised release following his prison term. Terrence Hicks, of Jackson, MI, the patient recruiter, was ordered to pay more than $4.9 million in restitution, jointly with co-defendants, and to serve three years of supervised release following his prison term.”

AolTravel: Is the No-Fly List Working?

“‘The TSA is hoping to smooth glitches with the new Secure Flight program — a system by which the ‘TSA will conduct uniform prescreening of passenger information against federal government watchlists,’ according to an official statement. ‘The TSA is taking over this responsibility from the airlines.’ The TSA says the Secure Flight system will be in effect for all domestic flights by mid-2010 and all international flights by the end of 2010, at which time the latest two-hour notification rule will become moot (since the airlines will no longer be responsible). Meanwhile, in the case of Shahzad, Kahn says it’s important to remember that the current system — for all its perceived faults related to his near escape — ultimately did what it was meant to do.”

ITBusinessEdge: Baby Steps to Master Data Management

“If you want to start small with master data management, you’ve got to start with a noun, says Evan Levy, a partner at Baseline Consulting  and an instructor with The Data Warehousing Institute… The problem is, IT doesn’t think in nouns. IT is all about the verb: Defining, coding, testing, supporting. What’s more, IT departments tend to view the world in terms of projects – fulfilling this feature request, upgrading to this release, migrating to this server.”

Liliendahl on Data Quality: Aadhar (or Aadhaar)

“In Denmark we have had such an identifier (one for citizens and one for companies) for many years. It is not used by everyone everywhere – so you still are able to make money being a data quality professional specializing in data matching. The main reason that the unique citizen identifier is not used all over is of course privacy considerations.”

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