Garbage in, Garbage Out

In an editorial in the New York Times Thursday, the paper calls the 2007 Secure America Through Verification and Enforcement Act, " a bad idea compounded by the notoriously bad state of federal government records."

The act would, among other things, "force all workers, including citizens, to prove they have a right to earn a living," by relying on the Social Security Administration to verify Social Security numbers for workers, the paper contends. The problem is that one SSA database has a 4 percent error rate, which would mean possibly thousands of workers would face firings and discrimination.

Other federal databases contain errors. The inspector general at the Justice Department reported last year that the Terrorist Watch List, which is used to screen 270 million people a month to identify possible terrorists, has a large error rate. "In an examination of 105 records, for example, the auditors found that 38 percent of the records contained errors or inconsistencies that the [Terrorist Screening Center's] own quality-assurance efforts had not found," according to a Washington Post article.

As the federal government relies more on information technology to support critical decisions, the importance of how clean its data is rises.

How confident are you that your data is error free?