The Not So Great Fortune 500 Enterprise
By Mike Betron, Infoglide Software Director of Marketing
Of the various types of crime involving fraud, individual cases of people scamming workers’ compensation garner the most publicity. The stories typically read like this: “Joe Blow was drawing workers’ comp while working as a personal trainer, and after he was caught on video, he had to pay back $9000 and received a five-year suspended jail sentence.” While the human interest aspect of these stories, especially those including video of an injured worker involved in heavy physical activity, capture the most public attention, more organized activities impact the U.S. economy much more negatively.
The National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB) recently released a comparison of reported instances of suspected insurance fraud for the first half of 2010 versus the first half of 2009. An article in the Charleston Post and Courier observed that “while there’s no definitive study to link the economic recession to insurance fraud, certain types of claims are rising as other forms of income, from stock dividends to paychecks, are drying up. And the trend is creating more work for the parties who work together to fight insurance fraud.”
In highlighting the cost of fraud three years ago in IdentityResolutionDaily, we tagged it as a tax on all of us. The Post and Courier article said that “those types of insurance cost more than $85 billion a year, spreading an extra cost of $1,030 per year to the average household. ‘If insurance fraud was a business, it would be a top Fortune 500 company,” the A.G.’s website states.’”
The bad news is that this “Fortune 500” fraud enterprise is big and growing; the good news is that the more organized it gets, the more detectable it becomes using entity resolution.
