Identity Resolution Daily

By the Infoglide Team

Hays Daily News: Making the move to electronic records a natural fit for clinic

“Beginning in 2015, providers who have not successfully demonstrated meaningful use will face cuts in the amount of Medicare reimbursement they receive. It will begin with 99-percent payment in 2015, and drop to 97 percent by 2017, according to information from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. ‘So if your practice has not implemented an EHR and have meaningful use, you’re going to get reimbursed less dollars for the same service as someone who does,’ Brull said.”

GIGaom: Jeff Jonas Video on How Data Makes Corporations Dumb

“‘Information is being created faster than organizations can make sense of it,’ he says. The gap between the growth of information and understanding is widening because the tools for understanding are not scaling as fast as the growth in data and information.  ‘As computers are getting faster and the world is getting more sensors, the organizations have been getting dumber,’ he said. ‘The percentage of what is knowable is on a decline.’”

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By Kevin Moore, Infoglide Software Director of Fraud Solution Sales

Several years ago, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) published guidelines for creating fusion centers at the state, local, and federal levels. Since then, fusion centers have become a hot trend in the law enforcement community.  At last count, there were 72 designated centers around the country that are recognized by DHS (and that number is probably low by now). If governmental agencies with common concerns can band together to create fusion centers, it seems possible that private companies with common goals could use technologies such as identity resolution to achieve them.

Do businesses share common problems that could be better addressed by creation of “private fusion centers”? I thought of a few in a short time, so there are likely many more. It turns out that one called LERPnet already exists within the retail community:

The Law Enforcement Retail Partnership Network (LERPnet) is a secure national database for the reporting of retail theft and serious incidents, which allows retailers to share information with each other and law enforcement. In response to an alarming rise in organized retail crime, the retail industry and the FBI have teamed up to launch LERPnet. With LERPnet, retailers and law enforcement will be able to fight back against illegal activity including organized retail crime, burglaries, robberies, counterfeiting, and online auction fraud.

The details are on the LERPnet web site. Clearly, it took a lot of effort to resolve some key issues before it was launched. Companies are understandably concerned about complying with privacy laws and want some assurance that they won’t assume liability should a breach occur. They also consider their customer information to be proprietary, so solutions need to share only data about suspected fraud cases while leaving good customer data unshared. In many cases, scores instead of data can be shared. The general principle is to leave data in place as much as possible and don’t share proprietary data with others.

The LERPnet example could be classified as a “quasi-private” system since the participants include law enforcement agencies. What about your industry? Are there ways that well-protected information sharing could enable your company to avoid “doing business with people that, if they had a full view of that person, they would never even let them in the door”?

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By Douglas Wood, Infoglide Senior Vice President

On the heels of the very successful Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) conference last month comes an industry event which represents investigators of financial crimes and fraud.  The International Association of Financial Crimes Investigators (IAFCI) meets in Washington, DC next week with an agenda that is chock full of sessions involving discussions of best practices for solving and preventing financial crimes.

With an audience looking to share thoughts on insider trading detection, mortgage fraud, organized crime ring detection, anti-money laundering and insurance claims fraud, the conference is sure to be buzzing!

One thing for certain is that there is no one “right” answer to prevention and investigation.  As I pointed out in a previous post here, it is clear that predictive analytics technologies have been a valuable tool for organizations to “catch” fraudsters based upon their behaviors.   With more and more organizations adopting identity resolution technology, however, those “best practices” are becoming even better.

Identity resolution technology goes at the heart of who’s who… and who’s working with whom… by “gliding” across an organization’s data (internal and/or third party) and searching for those tiny pieces of forensic data attributes that are the golden nuggets of financial crime investigation.  Identity resolution helps investigators understand the identity matches and non-obvious relationships between individuals across enterprise data – despite input errors or deliberate attempts to deceive.

In combating financial crimes, identity resolution technology has become the next big ‘thing’, as it provides answers to the following types of questions:

• Does someone in an incident database resemble someone in another database… and who else is connected to them?
• Is the witness in an insurance claim suspiciously similar to someone in the SIU data?
• Do credit card applicants share subtle attributes that would point to bust-out fraud?
• Does the loan applicant have a non-obvious relationship with an employee?  Or a known fraudster?
• How is the stock trader connected (by degrees of separation) to an insider?
• Is an applicant somehow connected to a Denied Person?

Infoglide Software Corporation, the leader in identity resolution engine technology, will be attending IAFCI next week and we would encourage you to drop by our booth and say hello. Otherwise, drop a note to sales@infoglide.com and I will have someone reach out to you directly to explain how this all works.

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By Douglas Wood, Infoglide Senior VP

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.

We heard stories of insider trading, bust-out fraud, mortgage fraud, insurance claims fraud and organized retail crime.  Despite the diligence and hard work by the certified fraud examiners, too many of these stories ended up with a common theme - the crooks got away with an awful lot of booty before getting caught.

Predictive analytics and behavioral analytics have provided organizations with a great weapon in combating fraud.  Establishing norms and ranking activities against those norms can have a dramatic effect on reducing losses to fraud and crime.  What has been missing, however, is the wide-scale adoption of a tool that allows fraud examiners to “automatically connect the dots” between the bits and pieces of forensic information they have.  Identity Resolution is that tool… and it has been the talk of the conference here.

The powerful federated similarity search capabilities of identity resolution help investigators understand the hidden relationships between individuals across enterprise data (Applicants, SARs, Incidents, Employees, Claimants, Witnesses, etc).  Let’s face it, the fraudsters are typically not stupid.  They know how to get around the systems by engaging their family and friends to form a profitable fraud ring.  Identity Resolution gives companies the power to search into ALL their data with  a view to understanding “who’s who” and “who’s working with whom” - despite deliberate attempts to deceive.

We believe this technology is becoming absolutely critical for corporations to predict and examine fraudulent activity, and that mainstream adoption is happening right now.

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[Post from Infoglide] Fusion Centers Highlight Privacy Versus Security Issue

“It’s been quite awhile since we’ve addressed the challenge of balancing security and privacy. As authors of the software used more times every day than all other identity resolution software combined (video: Who Is Infoglide Software?), we are extremely conscious of how critical it is to strike a balance every day that ensures the security and protects the privacy of U.S. citizens.”

PBS: Getting dirty money clean

“‘Wachovia Bank willfully failed to establish an anti-money laundering program,’ said U.S. Attorney Sloman. Without a program to detect money laundering, here’s what happened: From 2003 to 2008, $420 billion flowed through Wachovia Bank from Mexico – including all that drug money – with no effective oversight.”

azcentral.com: Southeast Valley gets overall decrease in crime

“He also said that regional cooperation among agencies has improved greatly, particularly with the East Valley Gang and Information Fusion Center, where authorities sift through crime leads and data to battle crimes across city boundaries. The center allows Valley agencies to quickly share information on crimes and suspects.”

Green Valley News: Healing Health Care: Do efforts to combat fraud work?

“The Department of Health and Human Services, under which Medicare and Medicaid operate, beefed up the Recovery Audit Contractor program. This program, begun in 2005, uses contracted “bounty hunters” to recover improper paid monies. They receive a percentage of recovered dollars as a bounty. Sophisticated computer programs used to identify patterns of errors as well as other high-tech methods should improve the amount recaptured.”

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By Robert Barker, Infoglide Senior VP & Chief Marketing Officer

What’s it going to take to move the data quality space forward in the future? That’s the question recently addressed by Ted Friedman of Gartner as reported in an article in destinationCRM.com. He suggests that the real answer may be messaging.

“Vendors have done a reasonably poor job in that they could get better at articulating the true business value [of data quality solutions],” he says. The Gartner analyst notes that vendors tend to talk about functionality in terms of technological advances, rather than conveying how that technology actually supports the business infrastructure. Friedman also notes that, in general, vendors could get better at articulating how tools support initiatives such as information governance and regulatory compliance — two notable industry trends.

Ted is right that to call out vendors to improve our messaging. At Identity Resolution Daily, we get down into technical details fairly often. For example, our bloggers have talked about data matching, its relationship to identity resolution, critical requirements for identity resolution, and we’ve had a series on data quality. Professor John Talburt of UALR’s Center for Advanced Research in Entity Resolution and Information Quality (ERIQ) is a regular contributor who talks about technical definitions and issues surrounding these topic areas.

That’s not to say that business issues around entity resolution and information quality have been ignored. Real world problems like lottery retailer fraud have been a frequent topic, as has organized retail crime. Another business problem we’ve talked about is employers trying to cheat workers compensation laws, and we’ve actually discussed regulatory compliance (OK, so we did get a bit technical on that one).

A huge issue related to information governance is preserving the rights of individual privacy. Because of our involvement in TSA’s Secure Flight program, we’ve written about this issue repeatedly since Identity Resolution was created. A recent post captures the essence of the issue.

So at best, I’d have to say we get a C+ or a B- on our messaging. With our upcoming release of IRE 2.2, we’ll make every effort to respond to Ted’s constructive criticism of the data quality space.

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[Post from Infoglide] Speaking of Narrative Fallacy

Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable uses “narrative fallacy” to describe how we humans tend to enhance ex post facto our ability to predict events that in fact are extremely complex and random. A recent post on Netrics HD attempts to leverage this argument to demonstrate the superiority of “Machine Learning” (i.e. probabilistic analysis) over “data matching” (i.e. deterministic analysis).

advance: Security and Privacy Challenges to EHR Adoption

“Lest we forget, our country is trying to establish similar capabilities with the widespread initiative to implement electronic health records (EHRs). My health history should travel with me — just as easily as my financial information. With some sort of authentication process, a “core” set of data should be easily available to assist in my receipt of health services.”

New York Times: Flying? Don’t Book Under a Nickname

“The government’s aim is to streamline the process of checking travelers’ names against its watch lists — a task currently handled separately by each airline — and to collect more detailed information so passengers with names similar to those on the watch list are less likely to be mistakenly detained. Asking for a birth date, for instance, decreases the likelihood that a child with a name close to one on the list would be subject to an additional search — one example of a false match that has led to complaints.”

Integrated Solutions for Retailers: Organized Retail Crime: Scope, Solutions

“Popular targets of organized retail crime rings include Crest Whitestrips, Rogaine, Similac baby formula, razor blades, and pregnancy tests. Having not been stored or managed properly, these items can pose serious health risks for innocent shoppers looking for a good bargain. And, because most of these items are sold “new in box,” well-meaning consumers are unaware that what they purchased may be spoiled or expired  —  and stolen.”

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By the Infoglide Team

BI Blogs: Business Intelligence - The Unconquered Territories

“Let’s face it - There are technology limitations. Operational BI (Lack of real-time data access), Guided analytics (Lack of comprehensive business metadata), Information as a Service (Lack of SOA based BI architecture) are some of those technology limitations that come to my mind.”

SecurityInfoWatch: RILA survey: Retail crime on rise

“Some 72 percent of respondents said they have seen an increase in organized retail crime (ORC), and 52 percent said they had experienced a rise in financial fraud. Paul Jones, vice president of asset protection for RILA, noted that the increase in ORC should set off alarms not only within the retail community, but also within the business and law enforcement community. Organized retail crime typically involves organized groups of criminals operating shoplifting rings which have networks to fence their stolen goods, which may also appear on Internet auction sites like eBay, as well as at flea markets.”

Fast Company: Work/Life: “Secure Flight” Takes to the Air in August

“So now is the time to examine your driver’s license or passport to see that your first name, middle initial (if you use one), and last name appeared exactly the same across all of your identification. If you need a new photo for your driver’s license, now is the time to get it. Being consistent with your name also means that all of your bookings - including air, hotel, and car rental - must be consistent.”

SmartDataCollective: Enterprise Data World 2009

[Jim Harris] “Enterprise Data World is the business world’s most comprehensive vendor-neutral educational event about data and information management.  This year’s program was bigger than ever before, with more sessions, more case studies, and more can’t-miss content.”

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By the Infoglide Team

New York Times: Name Not on Our List? Change It, China Says

“By some estimates, 100 surnames cover 85 percent of China’s citizens. Laobaixing, or “old hundred names,” is a colloquial term for the masses. By contrast, 70,000 surnames cover 90 percent of Americans. The number of Chinese family names in use has tended to shrink as China’s population has grown, a winnowing of surnames that has occurred in many cultures over time.”

OCDQ Blog: All I Really Need To Know About Data Quality I Learned In Kindergarten

“When you present the business case for your data quality initiative to executive management and other corporate stakeholders, remember the lessons of show and tell.  Poor data quality is not a theoretical problem - it is a real business problem that negatively impacts the quality of decision critical enterprise information.”

BTNonline: Secure Flight Roils Booking Tech

“To facilitate the implementation of Secure Flight’s new data requirements for the travel industry, officials from the International Air Transport Association and Department of Homeland Security this year decided to use passenger data fields already used to transmit visa and passport information. TSA noted those IATA standards go into effect May 1.”

Security Systems News: Retail industry to ’speak with a single voice’

“There will now be a single entity both helping to establish best practices for loss prevention and lobbying state and federal government in regard to major security issues like organized retail crime.”

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[Post from Infoglide] Secure Flight and Identity Resolution

“Most of the time we’re just heads down doing our job of providing identity resolution solutions for our customers. But this is one of those weeks at Infoglide when we appreciate the opportunities we’ve had to make a difference. TSA announced that the Secure Flight Program has begun vetting passengers.”

[Post from Infoglide] TDWI Interview: Identity Resolution Reveals

“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.”

data quality PRO: Identifying Duplicate Customers (Part 2)

[Jim Harris] “False negatives can be caused when the greater concern about false positives motivates a cautious approach to duplicate identification. This leads many projects to adopt a strategy allowing only exact matches. Therefore, let’s begin by looking for duplicates where the exact same information is repeated on multiple records – meaning where all attributes are populated and have the same value…”

TMCnet.com: Workers’ comp fraud rising: Task force to make unannounced visits

“‘The theory is that in a difficult economic climate, crime tends to go up as does fraud. People who aren’t otherwise motivated to be dishonest may follow that path,’ said Maureen O’Connell deputy district attorney with the fraud unit. The unit has seen a marked increase in workers’ compensation fraud over the past year and has had to double the fraud unit’s staff to handle the volume, she said.”

data quality PRO: External Reference Data - An Overview

“My guess is that exploiting external reference data as an important element in achieving optimal data quality will increase heavily in the following years, and cloud computing will be a main driver.”

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