The bad joke in the headline aside, this story (which comes to us via Initiate Systems on Twitter, who linked to it from WBALTV in Baltimore USA) reveals a common type of IQ Trainwreck – the “sending things to dead people” problem.

As we know, the US Government has been sending out Stimulus Cheques (or Checks, if you are in the US) to people to help stimulate consumer spending in the US economy. Kind of like a defibrillator for consumer confidence.

Initiate Systems picked up on the story of a cheque that was sent to Mrs Rose Hagner. Her son found it in the mail and was a bit surprised when he saw it. After all, he’s 83 years old and his mother has been dead for over 40 years. Social Security officials give the following explanation:

Of the about 52 million checks that have been mailed out, about 10,000 of those have been sent to people who are deceased.

The agency blames the error on the strict mid-June deadline of mailing out all of the checks, which didn’t leave officials much time to clean up all of their records.

Of course, one might ask why this was such a challenge when the issue raised its head in 2008 as well when a cheque was mailed to a man in Georgia which was made out to a Mr George Croker DECD (an abbreviation for deceased). The story, which was picked up by SmartPros.com at the time (and for the life of us we can’t see how it slipped under our radar), describes the situation as follows:

Richard Hicks, a Fulton County magistrate, says the $600 check arrived in Roswell this week and was made out to George A. Coker DECD, which, of course, stands for “deceased.”

Coker obviously won’t be able to do his bit to spur the consumer economy, which has Hicks puzzled and somewhat miffed.

“There’s a $9 trillion national debt and our government’s giving away money to dead people,” he told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “As a taxpayer, it offends the hell out of me.”

The Internal Revenue Service in Atlanta told the newspaper it didn’t know how many other DECD checks have been written nationwide since the 2007 returns are still being processed.

So, the issue has existed since at least 2008 and relates to data being used for a new purpose (sending cheques on a blanket basis). It would seem the solution that is being attempted is to inspect the errors out of the cheque batches before they are sent by the June dead-line. A better solution might be to:

1. Apply some business rules to the process, for example “If recipient is older than 120 then verify – as the oldest person in the world is currently 115), or parse the name string to determine which social security records end with “DECD” or any other standard variant abbreviation for “deceased”.
2. Embed these checks (not cheques) into the process for managing the master data set rather than applying them at ‘point of use’.

Building quality into a process, and into the information produced by and consumed by a process, reduces the risk of embarrassing information quality errors. Cleaning and correcting errors or exceptions as a bulk batch process is not as value-adding as actually improving your processes to prevent poor quality information being created or being acted on.

Why is this an IQ Trainwreck?

Well, the volumes of records affected and the actual cost are quite low so one could argue that the information is “close enough for government work”. However, government work tends to get political and a google search on this topic has thrown up a lot of negative political comment from opponents of the stimulus plan.

The volume and actual cost may be low, but the likely impact in terms of PR impact and time that might be required to explain the issue in the media highlights the often overlooked cost and impact of poor quality information – reputation and credibility.