Getting Rid Of The Bad Guys
One of the biggest applications (or one of the more emerging apps, depending upon how you look at it) of Biometrics is use by the governments around the world to make sure that their poorest of the poor citizens get counted and included for any and all welfare benefits they are allowed to receive. This part of Biometrics is a very passionate topic of mine, and in of the samples of the quarterly newsletter, you can see a nice editorial written by a contributor based out of South Africa. But just as much as Biometrics is being used to help the poorest people on the planet, it is also being used to fight the bad guys who are trying to claim benefits that they are not entitled to receive.
A prime example of this is the country of Ghana, where a huge Biometrics Vendor known as “3M Cogent” is taking a huge part. Here are the details in this massive undertaking: “Ghana’s Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning initiative to clear the government’s payroll of ghost names has detected and expunged about 34,000 illegal names in seven regions that were on pensioners’ payroll. These ghost names account for 38% of the pensioners registered so far during the $2.385 million project, led by the US company 3M Cogent. Biometric data has been collected from 54,544 out of the 88,467 pensioners in the Greater Accra, Eastern, Volta, Central, Ashanti, Western and Brong Ahafo regions . . . A significant percentage of the government’s discretionary budget goes to public sector payroll expenditure, which is perceived to be bloated with fraudulent employee records and gross over-payments. The lack of adequate mechanisms to effectively identify ghost names on the payroll and delete them has been one major contributing factor for the failure of head counts in the past. While ghost names have been identified and expunged from the payroll, more ghost names have continued to find their way onto the payroll.” (SOURCE: http://www.findbiometrics.com/articles/i/9466/).
My Take
Well, really, if you read the entire above quote, the story says it all. Biometrics (although the specific technology is not mentioned, I can assume it is fingerprint recognition) has cleared out some 34,000+ names of people trying to claim benefits fraudulently. In terms of percentages, this comes out to close to 40%. Now, that is a rather huge amount. My hats off here to the government of Ghana to take such huge steps. And as you can see from the above quote as well, this country is one which spends a huge amount of money in welfare and pensions (how it stacks up against the other poor countries around the world, I have no idea).
As a result, there is a huge bloat factor and severe over grossing of payments to people who do not deserve this money. Also to put in monetary terms, “ . . . GH¢16 million monthly and GH¢192 million annually” has been saved by the Ghana government. Not exactly sure what the exchange rate is with the US dollar, it sure sounds like a large amount in absolute terms. According to the article where I got this information, in June of this year, the government of Ghana is going to register some 730,000 public employees to reduce the amount of fraud there as well. Now, here we see the use of Biometrics so well here in these underdeveloped countries. It truly amazes me to see how these governments can adopt Biometrics so well, and we here in the United States have such a hard time publicly accepting it. I mean, think about it.
These governments barely have enough to support an infrastructure like ours, but yet, they are willing to spend and invest money into some of the latest security technologies in order to help their own people out. But, another story yet here is going to develop. As the global economic crisis still lingers, and as doubts about Europe continue especially with regards to the inevitable downfall of the Euro, we will see, in my view, these countries and ours take on Biometrics on an even much grander scale. This is so, because as many people get laid off, or are unable to find work for long periods of time, the net resultant will be that these people will try to find income through the respective governments.
And as the amount of these people escalate, the need to use Biometrics will only proliferate greater in order to separate out the “wheat from the chaff”, as the saying goes. Now while this is of course good news to our industry, perhaps it is time that we learn from these poorer countries in how to use Biometrics to fight our own welfare fraud, before it becomes too late. And again in my view, this will truly be the irony of all ironies the United States will still face.
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