Combating Identity Fraud in the Public Domain: Information Strategies for Healthcare and Criminal Justice

Abstract

Two trends are present in both the private and public domain: increasing interorganisational co-operation and increasing digitisation. Nowadays, more and more processes within and between organisations take place electronically. These developments are visible on local, national and European scale. Research, strategy and policy often focus on the technological issues, whereas the organisational issues are complex and important as well. These issues prove to be difficult on a local scale and barely manageable on national and European scales, because the number of parties increases greatly and because of differences in culture, legislation and IT infrastructure. We introduce the theoretical framework of Chain-computerisation that explains large-scale chain co-operation as an answer to a dominant chain problem. Identity fraud proves to be the dominant chain problem in many chain co-operation situations. Therefore, our main research question is: what is a successful information strategy to combat identity fraud in the large-scale processes that constitute the public domain? Next, we demonstrate the problem of identity fraud using the example of the Dutch criminal justice chain, showing that a certain chain communication system enables to stop identity fraud using forensic biometrics. The second example is about healthcare. In the Netherlands, the government is introducing a national system of medical information exchange based on the national personal number as the sole identifier for recognition and linking. We show that people sometimes have interest in using somebody else’s number, to be treated in cases (s)he is not insured. This identity fraud can contaminate medical records on a national scale. We ponder about infrastructural elements that enable international exchange of medical information on a European scale and ask ourselves which additional safeguards will be necessary on this enormous scale. The examples are taken from our chain analysis programme that has an exploratory, empirical character. A chain analysis tests empirical findings against the theoretical framework of Chain-computerisation, to derive a suitable chain-specific information strategy. We use this novel approach which is specifically tailored to the peculiarities of large-scale situations, as opposed to the small-scale approach usually employed in these cases. The traditional authentication procedures do not take into account ‘wrong person’ identity fraud that causes fraud surreptitiously spreading from chain to chain. Therefore, in both cases, the problem of identity fraud presents a threat to the chain co-operation that has to be tackled with a large-scale approach and with person-oriented security procedures and instruments that are indeed able to prevent identity fraud from happening undetected. It is precisely this approach and this type of procedures and instruments that are explained here. This is a novel contribution to information science and to the security realm that still pivots only on traditional authentication frameworks. Taking into account that it is probable that the problem of identity fraud rises in many other domains and countries as well, we conclude that identity fraud is a major threat to the European society. Finally, we argue that an information strategy using basic, but chain-specific information systems, combined with random identity verification procedures enable combating identity fraud.