Using Entity Resolution to Police Businesses That Deceive
By Mike Betron, Infoglide Software Director of Marketing
A recent video story on KING5 in Seattle highlighted the aggressive efforts state agencies take to ferret out employment fraud. This particular story highlights an agency’s success in identifying and prosecuting unlicensed contractors. Such willingness to work around licensing regulations can also signal a cavalier attitude about providing workers’ compensation insurance to employees as required by law.
Many organizations face the challenge of identifying individuals or businesses that intend to deceive by altering their identity in some manner. Detecting employer fraud in workers’ comp is an example that has been highlighted in a journal article:
In order to avoid paying premiums, a company’s owners may illegally classify permanent employees as contractors. Alternately, they may operate for some time without paying their premiums, and then when the insurer is about to take action, they simply shut down the company on paper and reconstitute it under another name. Companies also use this “going out of business” ploy in cases where their experience (or modification) rating has gone up due to multiple injuries, thereby resulting in higher premiums. By reopening as another company, they can effectively reset their experience rating.
Entity analytics uses a combination of similarity searching and transitive matching to alert authorities about companies or contractors that advertise themselves as open for business and who are related to companies or contractors as known offenders. Enhancing existing systems in this way with entity resolution makes them even stronger.
