Category Archives: Government Process IQ Trainwrecks

Grevious misuse of statistics

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The BBC today (2008-10-23) carries a news story about the under-reporting of serious crime due to the mis-classification of certain crimes. The story is examined in more detail in an op-ed piece “How the police missed the violence”..

The problem has come about when the intended victim manages to escape serious harm when attacked. The example given concerns a pub fight in which the assailant attempts to “glass” the victim but she suffers only minor injuries not the intended major damage to her face. The police then classify the crime not as “grievous bodily harm with intent to cause serious injury.” but as merely(?) “grievous bodily harm”.

14 forces have gone back through their statistics and reclassified GBH’s as the more serious crime where intent was clearly present but no great injury was suffered. This has resulted in a 22% jump in reported violent crime over the same period last year although it has not affected the total number of offences reported.

The IQ lesson here concerns the way in which business terms are defined and then applied. The key word in the definition is “intent” but many officers on the ground concentrate on the phrase “to cause serious injury”.Mind you as an ordinary man in the street I think I would classify GBH as a violent crime but officially in falls into the “Other personal crime (with Injury)” category which is not seemed a serious category.

Economic impact of Information Quality

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First off – an apology for not posting a bit more regularly. It’s not that there aren’t any IQ Trainwrecks, it’s just that there have been so many recently we’ve been spoiled for choice for the ones to use and we haven’t had time to edit and compile them all.

However, one that jumped out of the headlines this morning is the news that Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs in the UK has shelved it’s home sales statistics report until September , “adding to concerns over the quality of official data which help inform interest rate policy at a time when the economy is teetering on the edge of recession” (according the the Irish Times).

Just what you need in a time of economic crisis – inaccurate and unreliable information to support planning or even measure how good or bad things are. According to the report:

City economists and even the Bank of England have been questioning the reliability of several official date series including trade, growth and retail sales.

Apparently, inconsistencies were found between statistics to published this month (August) and last month. According to the HMRC spokesperson quoted in the article:

“All months in the statistical series are affected, with the differences showing falls in some months and increases in others. We are working to understand the reason for these differences so that a reliable set of statistics can be produced.”

Interestingly, from an Information Quality perspective, one of the main groups that ‘consume’ this information don’t seem to be surprised by the existence of errors but rather by the fact that the report has been withdrawn.

The article highlights a possible root cause of error:

“The ONS, which is also replacing its main measure of wages because it was found it did not capture the true picture, relocated from London to Newport in Wales this year in a move to cut down on costs – leading to a large number of staff changes “

Why is this an IQ trainwreck?Absence of timely and reliable information about economic performance affects the ability of the government to plan and manage economic policy to manage the impacts of an economic down turn and avoid more serious difficulties for individuals.

So, they’ve got guns and are trained to kill…

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let’s screw with their pay…

From the erstwhile The Register comes this story about on-going information quality problems in the British Forces pay and personnel system. There have been complaints of pay being withheld for months.

The MOD blames the data input monkeys  staff and insists that the system is working fine.

“Input errors based on a degree of unfamiliarity with the new scheme have resulted in a small number of pay inaccuracies,” according to the MoD.

“Thorough investigation of these errors has shown that the JPA system is working extremely well… JPA… requires accurate and timely input from… HR administrators.”

Additional training measures are, of course, being provided to staff and the MoD is keen to point out the long term benefits of the system in terms of reduced manpower needs in HR and fewer systems to maintain.

Of course, the complexity of the payroll system should not be underestimated, particularly if there are staff at similar grade with differing pay structures. Add to that the requirement for rock solid security (given the sensitivity of the information) and the system requirements become even more complex.

However, basic validation and verification of information (perhaps a reconciliation between the new system and the old system at data migration) might have mitigated this problem.

Why is this an IQ Trainwreck? Well, they’ve pissed off members of some of the most elite fighting units in the world… not something I’d do.

We all know toddlers are terrors…

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… but this story (again culled from The Register.co.uk) shows the lengths the US government goes to to stop these known terrors from getting on planes via the Terrorist Screening lists maintained by the Dept Homeland Security.

“USA Today tells the story of a Disney World-loving 6-year-old who shares a name with someone on the “additional screening” list. Little John Anderson hasn’t made it onto the cleared list because his mum finds the TRIP web site confusing.”

So Little Johnny Anderson can’t fly to Disney World without having to prove he isn’t a terrorist. Hard to do for a tired and pissed off six year old, as any parent will tell you. I can only imagine how they explain it to him:

Mommy Anderson: Now Johnny, the nice TSA man only wants to make sure you won’t try to fly a plane into the Magic Kingdom and kill Goofy

L’il Johnny: Whhaaaaaahhhhhh…. iwannagoseegoofynmickeynminniendonalducknowmommy…whahhhh (Johnny kicks TSA agent… join us next week for L’il Johnny goes to Cuba).

Processes are in place for people to get themselves taken of the list via a website… but Johnny’s mother finds the website confusing. Having looked at the site it doesn’t seem to have any clear process entry point for “The US Government thinks (correctly) my child is a terrorist but good God I can keep them under control, please let us go to Disney”. It would seem that Mommy Anderson might need to get L’il Johnny to fill out a form to allow her to make a complaint on his behalf. He’s six. He may not understand that words like pursuant, perjury or that if he lies on the form he could to prison until he is ELEVEN!!

So the process to correct errors in the information is not customer focussed. Mommy Anderson and L’il Johnny just have to put up with his being on a watch list because the process to correct the list isn’t friendly to the information consumer/creator.

L’il Johnny isn’t alone. The Register points out that he shares his story with Javaid Iqbal, a seven year old British boy who was stopped repeatedly at US airports when on holiday in Florida (which if you are seven years old translates as Disneyland). He shared his name with someone who had been deported from the US. His name was shared, not his age. L’il Javaid’s passport is now stamped that he underwent high level security checks, pretty much condemning him to a life of Eurostar trips to EuroDisney from now on. Imagine if his name had been Lee Harvey Oswald.

These are the easy funny stories that highlight weaknesses in the quality of information and processes in this important function of the US Dept of Homeland Security. A less funny story is that

  1. There is some confusion about how big these lists are… a government report says 7555000, but a spokesman for the TSA says that he thinks it is less than half that
  2. 97% of people who have managed to get through the process that Mommy Anderson finds confusing are simply namesakes of people on the lists.
  3. Less than half of the requests to be taken off the lists (to correct inaccuracy in information and improve quality) have been processed since the facility went ‘live’ in February.  41% are “still being discussed” or are awaiting further documentation to prove the claims of the people who complained.

Why is this an IQTrainwreck?

  1. The level of inaccuracy in the information causes disruption to people… L’il Johnny or L’il Javaid won’t understand what is going on. And in Javaid’s case it may actually affect his ability to re-enter the US (or other countries) in later life.
  2. There appears to be a lack of consolidated governance and control… not being able to answer “how many names are on the lists” and get a consistent response is like asking a company how many customers are in their CRM systems and getting mixed responses….( ohhh – bad example).
  3. The processes for correcting information are not ‘customer friendly’ and don’t seem to cater for the existence of children with names who might be too young to understand the processes or even the forms. The fact that parents find the process difficult to navigate suggests there is scope for improvement.

In any other context I’d be in favour of any measure that keeps screaming children off planes, particularly long flights (by which I mean any flight that lasts longer than 6 minutes).

However, I am reminded in these cases of why my father (a civil servant in the Irish Republic and, at the time, a senior trade unionist) used to hate going on trips to the North of Ireland.  Every so often some British Army squaddie or RUC officer would take him out of the car or off the bus for questioning because:

  • He had glasses
  • He had a beard
  • He wasn’t speaking with an English accent
  • therefore he must be Gerry Adams, leader of Sinn Fein and his id papers must be faked.

My parents had a hard time explaining that to the snotty-nosed crying kids in the back seat…

“Problems with the quality of the data” cause process traffic jam

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Hundreds of Irish motorists  (this author included) have technically driving uninsured because of delays with the National Car Test (the Irish equivalent of the UK MOT). This was reported by the Sunday Business Post on the 19th of August.

The Irish Road Safety Authority has confirmed that some motorists may not have been informed that their car was due its NCT. In Ireland you can’t insure your car with out a valid NCT certificate and not having an NCT certificate that verifies your vehicle’s roadworthiness could invalidate your insurance policy.

The root cause is identified by the company that operates the testing in Ireland as being “problems with the quality of the data” which resulted in them not getting details of all vehicles due for testing.

 Apparently the first that the company that adminsters the NCT knew of the problem was when people started to phone them asking them where their reminder letters where and seeking to make appointments.

The knock-on affect is that there is now a back log of a number of weeks for an appointment to get an NCT test. The Sunday Business Post refers to the testing centre in Donegal with a wait period of 6 weeks. My experience in the South East of Ireland has been a wait of over 2 months.

The NCT certificate on our car expired in July but due to my wife’s persistence on the phone we eventually got a test date in late August. I wonder if we would be insured if we were in a crash during that month?  Strictly speaking we would not have been as the vehicle would not have been certified as road-worthy.

In Ireland it is an offence to drive a vehicle that doesn’t have a valid NCT certificate. This offence carries with it a penalty of 5 ‘points’ on your drivers licence. 12 points results in your licence being taken away from you.  The impacts of this IQ Trainwreck were potentially significant.