Massachusetts contemplating biometrics to curb welfare fraud

Bill proposes Mass. study implementation of fingerprinting, biometrics to reduce welfare fraud (MassLive)

Under the provision, the Department of Transitional Assistance and the Office of Health and Human Services would be required to study the feasibility of using biometrics - which includes fingerprints - to reduce fraud in public benefit programs.

The language, part of a $15.4 million amendment assembled by the House Committee on Ways and Means, cleared the House on a 158-0 vote Tuesday afternoon.

New York City actually implemented a system like this a few years back. It worked, too. Mayor Bloomberg liked it. Governor Cuomo didn't. Survey data at the time indicated that a majority (53%) of Americans favored such an approach.

See:
New York City: Fingerprints for Auditing Food Stamps (October, 2011)
Governor Proposes to Prevent New York City From Using Biometrics To Stem Welfare Fraud (May, 2012)

NYPD getting mobile fingerprint tech

NYPD Equips Officers With Biometric Smartphones (Government Technology)

New York Police Department officers and vehicles are to be outfitted with new technology as part of a $160 million program that will lead to fewer arrests and more summonses after being fully implemented next year, Mayor Bill de Blasio told reporters on Oct. 23.

All 35,000 NYPD officers will be equipped with smartphones that allow officers to search databases, view wanted posters and scan suspects’ fingerprints.

Following Mayor Bloomberg’s remark that public housing should incorporate fingerprinting technology and rumors of Apple implementing this technology for the new iPhones, two experts discussed the state of biometric security and where we are headed with it. (PIX 11)

There's a good video at the link. I removed the video from this post because of the annoying auto-play feature which comes with the embed code. The video at the link above does not autoplay.


UPDATE: An interesting take on the political part of the story that echoes our Technology-and-Policy theme... Bloomberg is Right and Wrong About Fingerprinting Public Housing Residents (Frontpage Mag)

Governor Proposes to Prevent New York City From Using Biometrics To Stem Welfare Fraud

Cuomo Pushing City to End Food-Stamp Fingerprinting (New York Times - h/t @m2sys)

This despite the facts that, according to the commissioner of the city’s Human Resources Administration, the system has saved over $35 million over the last ten years and New York City reaches a higher percentage of the food-stamp-eligible population than does the state as a whole.

Identity management is about people so it's not surprising that politics enters into government-run identity management systems.

That's as it should be, but this poll from February found that

53% believe Americans applying for food stamps should be required to be fingerprinted in order to be eligible. More than a third (36%) disagrees, while 11% are undecided.

So in terms of identity management in welfare programs, biometrics work (ROI), they're popular (unless New Yorkers have extremely different opinions of the subject that the US as a whole, 53% for, 36% against), and the governor wants to force the City to scrap them. Well, that's politics for you.

Like I said, Identity management is about people. Politics, too.

See also:
New York City: Fingerprints for Auditing Food Stamps
USA: 53% Favor Fingerprinting Requirement For Food Stamp Applicants

New York Facial Recognition

Facebook Photo Used To Identify Queens Shooting Suspect (Gothamist)

According to various news reports, the sophisticated face-recognition technology ultimately delivered the perp to the cops, but this is overlooking the most important part: this criminal had his pictures posted on Facebook, and the brother of the guy he shot knew where to look for them. [emph. in orig.]

NYPD Unveils CSI-Esque Facial Recognition Unit (Gothamist)

The NYPD is starting to catch up with CSI: they announced yesterday that they have started incorporating a new facial recognition unit into the department, which will use digital technology to match video images of people at crime scenes to mug shots on file. It promises to be their biggest technological advancement since they discovered the Segway.

h/t @Allevate

Biometric Time and Attendance in the Public Sector

Broadalbin to install time clock (The Leader-Herald - Gloversville, NY)

"Of course, the time clock can only establish the time they are on the job," Winney said. "It can't make anyone work harder once at the job."

Read the whole thing. Smaller localities are rapidly adopting biometric time-and-attendance solutions, and their news outlets frequently do an excellent job of illuminating the issues involved in a concise, no-nonsense, way.

Vendor to Pay $500 Million to Avoid Federal Prosecution in CityTime Scandal

We drew attention to this topic in late 2010 in: Big-Time fraud in NYC time-and-attendance initiative then again in T&A in NYC.

Contractor Strikes $500 Million Deal in City Payroll Scandal (New York Times)

A major government contractor agreed on Wednesday to pay a record $500 million to avoid federal prosecution for its role in the scandal-tarred CityTime project, an effort at modernizing New York’s payroll system. The project was plagued by widespread fraud and weak oversight and became a lingering embarrassment for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s administration.

Under an agreement with federal prosecutors, the contractor, Science Applications International Corporation, will reimburse the city for about 80 percent of the money it spent on the project, whose budget ballooned to nearly $700 million, from $73 million, and was described by the United States attorney in Manhattan, Preet Bharara, as “a fraudsters’ field day that lasted seven years.”

There is a great need to bring modern time and attendance techniques to the operations of cities large and small. The potential ROI is huge.

The Crime Wave of 1920 and the Making of the Modern FBI

Before the dawn of the Twentieth Century, The Bertillon System was the standard for biometric identification.

In 1903 the New York state prison system had begun to use fingerprints. By 1908, all the branches of the U.S. military had adopted fingerprints. In 1924, an act of congress established the Identification Division of the FBI. The IACP's National Bureau of Criminal Identification and the US Justice Department's Bureau of Criminal Identification consolidated to form the nucleus of the FBI fingerprint files (source - and a very interesting site in its own right).

How did we get there? Read on.

The Wall Street Bombing That Made Hoover and the FBI (Bloomberg)

Shortly after noon on Thursday, Sept. 16, 1920, a powerful bomb hidden in a horse-drawn wagon exploded at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in Manhattan. It was a pleasant late-summer day, and throngs of people had been out enjoying a lunchtime stroll, a brief respite from the great money machine, the center of American capitalism.

Now blood ran in the streets where the first U.S. Congress had convened and the Bill of Rights became law. Shrapnel scarred the walls and shattered the windows of J.P. Morgan and Co., America’s most formidable bank. The bomb killed at least 38 people and injured roughly 400. It was the deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. history, a distinction it held for 75 years. Its force reverberates today.

In Washington at that hour, J. Edgar Hoover, 25 years old, was putting the finishing touches on the federal government’s first counterterrorist force, the General Intelligence Division. Hoover wrote that he intended to combat “not only the radical activities in the United States” but also those “of an international nature”; not only radical politics, but “economic and industrial disturbances” as well.

...

Walk to the corner of Wall and Broad Streets today, and you can run your hands over the deep gouges left by the 1920 bombing. You will have to look harder to see the cameras that track your steps -- a 21st-century tribute to Hoover, the architect of the modern surveillance state. Every fingerprint on file, every byte of biographic and biometric data in the computer banks of the government, owes its origins to him.

See also:
The Bertillon System: An Early ID Management System
The History of Fingerprints (and the Death of the Bertillon System)

New York, Apartment Living, Security & Technology

Safer Buildings with Technology (The Cooperator via @HodgeBarry)

Recent nationwide crime statistics show that New York City and its outlying suburbs has become one of the safest cities of its size in the past 15 years. Nevertheless, in a sprawling metropolitan area encompassing New York and New Jersey, security is always a concern.

“People are either interested in security or they’re not. There are plenty of options out there for a condo or co-op to better protect their building,” says Harry Squasoni, senior vice president of American Security Systems, based in Long Island City. “Most buildings still have keys, which is the worst security alive. Keys go to girlfriends, boyfriends, contractors…you have no idea who has keys to your building.”

NY: Washington County Seeks to Control Costs with Biometric Time & Attendance

Audit targets lax practices at Washington County (PostStar.com)

Employee payroll expenses, overtime and benefits accounted for about 42 percent of the county's $112 million spending plan in 2010.

Weak ID, Crime and the Economics of the Agricultural Sector

Editorial: Tamper-proof ID an idea worth trying (The Daily News - New York)

U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer summed up nicely a little over a week ago what many farmers have been saying for years: Farmers need better tools for checking the identification of their workers.

Sen. Schumer was speaking in response to questions about the Oct. 30 stabbing death of Kathleen Byham in a store parking lot in Albion. The man charged with her death, Luis A.Rodriguez-Flamenco, confessed to killing her, offering no explanation for his action. Rodriguez-Flamenco, it turned out, is not only an illegal immigrant. He had been accused of committing another crime, but gave police a false name and was granted bail. He also turned out to be wanted in the state of Georgia for violating probation. He was able to evade the authorities for so long because immigration policies in this country have flaws big enough to drive harvesting machines through.

Earlier post along similar lines:
USA: Georgia Agricultural Commissioner and San Francisco County Clerk agree: Biometrics Make ID Stronger

New York City: Fingerprints for Auditing Food Stamps

Fingerprinting Those Seeking Food Stamps Is Denounced (New York Times)

New York City, where 1.8 million people receive food stamps, is one of only two jurisdictions in the country that require applicants to be fingerprinted, according to Ms. Quinn’s office. The other is Arizona.

California and Texas recently lifted a similar requirement; New York stopped using fingerprinting for food-stamp recipients statewide in 2007, but kept it in New York City at the Bloomberg administration’s request.

Robert Doar, the commissioner of the city’s Human Resources Administration, said the policy deterred fraud and prevented case duplication, catching 1,200 duplicated cases a year and saving about $4 million annually in federal benefits.

The Gothamist also has a poll associated with its article on the issue. Currently, a slim majority of the 296 respondents answer in the affirmative to the question, "Should Food Stamp Recipients Be Fingerprinted?" This despite the generally disapproving tone of the two linked articles.

New York: Seven Arrested For Alleged SAT Cheating Ring UPDATE: SAT, Biometrics & ROI

Educator: Pressure On Kids Massive; Attorney: District, Not Courts, Should Rule  (CBS - New York via Drudge)

Eshaghoff, who graduated from the high school in 2010 and is currently enrolled at Emory University in Atlanta, was paid between $1,500 and $2,500 per student. He has been arrested and charged with scheme to defraud, falsifying business records and criminal impersonation.

There's big money at stake in administering the test and there's big money and status at stake in obtaining a high score on the test. Many standardized tests use biometrics in order to increase the integrity of the test results.

After all, only half of what the College Board does involves making up and scoring tests. The other half is credentialing and ID management. In the second half, confidence is everything.

Biometrics are already very commonly used for graduate level admissions testing.

See also: Biometrics employed to crack down on proxy test takers

UPDATE:
ETS, the nonprofit that administers the SAT under the auspices of the College Board, told Newsday that it had no intentions of tightening security. (International Business Times via @M2SYS)

We talk (Return on Investment) ROI a lot here.

It's likely that biometric identity management for the SAT currently yields a negative ROI.

The GMAT, among other graduate admissions tests uses biometrics, but the graduate tests are a lot more expensive (GMAT $250; SAT $47). The SAT is taken by far more people and in a wider variety of locations (local high schools, etc.) while the graduate level exams are taken at professional testing centers facing different staff training and technology procurement incentives.

If the incidence of SAT cheating is sufficiently rare that the ETS is not losing credibility as a credentialing authority (i.e. colleges still trust them), it's not hard to see why they're planning to keep their current ID management procedures... for now.

UPDATE II (December 16, 2011):
"For now" may have lasted three months.

Is ETS Reconsidering its ID Management Practices? (CNN)

Even before the College Board receives recommendations from Freeh's security firm, it is weighing several new measures to stamp out impersonations.

The nonprofit is considering adjustments to the number and type of IDs it requires from test-takers, as well the use of digital photography in authenticating test-takers' identities, Caperton testified.

Other options it is likely to examine include palm-vein identification technology; fingerprinting, which is used on the LSAT exam; and requiring that students take the test at their own schools.

But in addressing the impersonation issue, the College Board may well create other problems.

If new ID requirements are perceived as a hassle, some students might decide not to take the test at all.

T&A in NYC: Update

After fraud probe, NYC's payroll system clocks in (Wall Street Journal - link inactive)

The program's cost has ballooned from $68 million to more than $700 million.

Earlier posts:
Big-Time fraud in NYC time-and-attendance initiative (12/17/2010)
NYC payroll chief resigns after fraud probe (12/24/2010)

Biometric ID management technologies have the ability to help institutions to combat fraud but the implementations aren't inherently immune from corruption.

Nevertheless, even after the extreme cost overruns that increased the projected cost by a factor of ten, I wouldn't be surprised to see NYC recognize a positive ROI.

From Wikipedeia:

[In 2006] The New York City government's budget is the largest municipal budget in the United States. The city government spends about $50 billion a year, employs 250,000 people, spends about $15 billion to educate more than 1.1 million children, levies $27 billion in taxes, and receives $14 billion from federal and state governments.

$700M / 250,000 employees = $2,800 per employee

Depending upon the scope of inaccuracies in the NYC bureaucracy and the comprehensiveness of the system implemented, recognizing a ROI for the system might not take long at all.

Big-Time fraud in NYC time-and-attendance initiative

CityTime Consultants Charged With Stealing $80 Million (Gothamist)

Four consultants hired to run quality assurance have been accused of taking $80 million in "an elaborate fraud and kickback scheme" that involved faked time sheets (ha!) and a series of shell companies. According to the suit the suspected ringleader even got his mom and his wife in on the scheme!

Fraud is fraud and it could occur with any government contract entrusted to corrupt individuals. As noted by the quoted section above, the fact that faked time sheets were used to steal from a biometric time and attendance system contract is at the least ironic.

UPDATE:
NYC payroll chief resigns after fraud probe