I think that you might be correct. Having effective management of citizen master data is a desirable objective that doubtless reduces the cost of delivering government services in Denmark.

Ireland suffers from a significant lack of ‘joined up thinking’ in this area, but I know that a number of Councils (local government areas) in the UK have made excellent inroads into joining things up.

However, in this case I think that part of the problem is that the data was ‘good enough’ for normal processes but not for the kind of super-normal activities that the Obama stimulus is calling for. the real IQtrainwreck here is the potential political fall out and lack of trust in the quality of data, rather than the waste of sending cheques to deceased persons.

Of course, given the impact that the data quality problems in the driver license systems had on voter registration in the US (which we documented here previously) one might think that some joined up thinking is required now to get to the root causes of these issues, perhaps along the Danish example.

In Denmark were I live all citizen ID’s, name, address and status data are stored at single place at the government – and almost all public authorities connects to that master data hub.

It started about 40 years ago with the most important systems run by the authorities as tax, driving license, social security, electoral, health care and other administrative areas and more and more areas are connected.

The latest area where I did a connection was with a regional transport authority. Now every holder of a season card or other personalised product is identified with the national citizen hub. So now they know all your relocations – inside the region, outside the region or to the next world. As a last morbid service in the latter case your subscription is cancelled automatically.

Is it an elegant solution? – or is it too much big mother is watching you?