State Agencies Adopting Entity Resolution
By Robert Barker, Infoglide Senior VP & Chief Marketing Officer
Fresh out of grad school, I initiated a career in software development by writing software for state agencies. Although I migrated to work for software companies several years later, lessons learned in those beginning years were a great platform for later challenges.
Significant opportunities to apply identity resolution and entity analytics exist at the state level. State agencies interact with citizens and corporations across many domains, including collection of tax revenues (e.g. oil and gas – I’m from Texas!), licenses (e.g. motor vehicles, hunting, fishing), housing programs, lotteries, child protective services, health care, workers’ compensation, the court system, law enforcement, and homeland security.
In most of these areas, it’s important to know exactly who you’re dealing with and who their associates are. For example, we’ve partnered with a state workers’ compensation organization to help them detect employers trying to defraud the state by paying lower premiums than they rightfully should. These employers try to foil the state by dissolving and reforming under different company names, but identity resolution is adept at uncovering such unlawful maneuvers.
New entity resolution applications that deal simultaneously with multiple sources of data residing at multiple agencies promise to make state government more efficient and effective. For example, an agency that requires a citizen to supply information during an application process can augment that process with incremental real-time services that find linkages to other data, thus making it possible to stop payments and/or deny licensing to “dead beat dads”, people who have unpaid taxes, etc. until they meet their legal responsibilities.
While using entity resolution in commercial and federal applications is moving rapidly, states have only just begun to exploit this new technology. If you know of areas that need to be addressed, we’d like to hear about them.
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