Towards an information strategy for combating identity fraud in the public domain: Cases from healthcare and criminal justice

Abstract

Two trends are present in both the private and public domain: increasing interorganisational co-operation and increasing digitisation. More and more processes within and between organisations take place electronically, on local, national and European scale. The technological and organisational issues related to this prove to be difficult on a local scale and barely manageable on national and European scales. We introduce the theoretical framework of Chain-computerisation, which 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: how to arrive at a successful information strategy to combat identity fraud in the large-scale processes that constitute the public domain? We demonstrate the problem of identity fraud on the basis of two Dutch cases, from the criminal justice chain and the healthcare sector. These cases are taken from our chain research programme in which we test empirical findings against the theoretical framework of Chain-computerisation to derive a successful chain-specific information strategy. In both cases, the problem of identity fraud presents a threat to the chain co-operation. Identity fraud has to be tackled with an approach focused on large-scale processes and with specific person-oriented security procedures and instruments preventing identity fraud from happening undetected. This study forms an important contribution to information science and to the security realm that still pivots only on traditional authentication frameworks that cannot cope with ‘wrong person’ identity fraud. In large-scale situations, therefore, additional safeguards will be necessary. Taking into account that the problem of identity fraud rises in many other domains and countries as well, we conclude that it is a major threat to the European society. Finally, we argue that chain-specific information systems with random identity verification enable combating identity fraud.