Lack of ownership info = fraud

A GAO report looks at how little business ownership information is collected by states (PDF). From the highlights (PDF) :

Federal law enforcement officials are concerned that criminals are increasingly using U.S. "shell" companies—companies with generally no operations—to conceal their identities and illicit activities. Though the magnitude of the problem is hard to measure, officials said that such companies are increasingly involved in criminal investigations at home and abroad. The information states collect on companies has been helpful in some cases, as names on the documents can generate additional leads. But some officials said that available information was limited and that they had closed cases because the owners of a company under investigation could not be identified.

Cyber-Museum of Scams & Frauds

That's how Quatloos.com describes itself:

Quatloos.com is a public educational website covering a wide variety of financial scams and frauds, including wacky “prime bank” frauds, exotic foreign currency scams, offshore investment frauds, tax scams, “Pure Trust” structures and more...

GAO Financial Restatement Database

At the Government Accountability Office's Web site you can download two tab-delimited files containing its Financial Restatement Database, which includes 1,786 announcements from July 1, 2002 to June 30, 2006 "identified as having been made because of financial reporting fraud and/or accounting errors." 

ShareSleuth.com

ShareSleuth aims to do "independent Web-based reporting aimed at exposing securities fraud and corporate chicanery":

Unlike mainstream media outlets, we're going to have a clear bias – against deception and corruption. We're going to depart from the traditional "he said, she said" model of journalism, with its false balance and toothless objectivity.

We're going to name names and show our evidence, by linking to documents, photographs and other information. We think that approach provides greater transparency than most newspapers, broadcast outlets and Internet news sites currently offer.

The site is funded by Mark Cuban, the co-founder of Broadcast.com and owner of the Dallas Mavericks. Cuban "in certain instances ... is going to make personal investments based on information we uncover," writes editor and president Christopher Carey, a former business reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Carey adds that "Those investments will be fully disclosed, so that readers can evaluate any potential conflicts of interest." BusinessWeek, CNet, Talking Biz News, AP and BusinessJournalism.org are among those who have written about the venture.

An interview with a forensics expert

An investigator whose cases included the U.N. oil-for-food scandal and the investigation into Holocaust victim assets held by Swiss banks discusses his work. His cases involve millions of paper and electronic records, and his tools of choice include SQL Server, Access, SAS and I2: " ... the element of intuition, creativity, intelligence, or, quite simply, thinking about what one is doing, is essential to the investigatory enterprise," he tells Fraud Magazine. "I think anyone who has sat around with a boatload of computer results and is trying to figure what they mean would agree to this notion."

MedlinePlus: Health Fraud

The MedlinePlus page on health fraud looks thin to me given the vastness of the subject, although it does link to some useful government resources on the subject, such as a 1999 overview from the FDA on "How to Spot Health Fraud." And I see no mention of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.

Fraud Update

Fraud Update, from the Center for the Study of Economic Crimes, tracks "government actions against fraud & other practices victimizing consumers, businesses & government."

Detecting health care fraud with network analysis

Jong-Sung You of the Social Science Statistics Blog highlights an example of how network analysis was used to detect health care fraud. The example came from a 1990 book by Malcolm Sparrow, License to Steal: How Fraud Bleeds America's Health Care System. "Professor Sparrow suggests that many ideas and concepts from network analysis can be useful in developing fraud-detection tools, in particular for monitoring organized and collusive multiparty frauds and conspiracies," You writes.

Hurricane vehicle and watercraft fraud database

The National Insurance Crime Bureau offers a database where you can search for vehicles or watercraft affected by Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma. Don't close the deal on a used car or boat these days without looking here first.

Investigating fraud by satellite

Matt Waite of the St. Petersburg Times says an NPR story on farm fraud is "a giant, flashing billboard of an idea for any ambitious investigative journalist in a farm state." He writes how a government investigator is using "remote sensing" - i.e. satellite photos - to find farmers who claim subsidies for crops they aren't growing.

Two companies are teaming up to market a database of employees accused of theft. You don't have to be convicted to appear in the database, or, it seems, to be denied a job, although the press release says the records "contain admissions of theft":

The USMA National Theft Database began by retailers who started sharing theft data to prevent the hiring of known thieves. Today, thousands of locations throughout the United States, including one-third of the nation’s largest retailers, contribute and share information through the USMA National Theft Database. The database houses information on nearly one million cases of theft and fraud, which include employee theft, shoplifting, refund/credit card fraud and the passing of bad checks. According to the National Retail Security Survey, as many as 86 percent of retail theft is not criminally prosecuted. Retailers gain value from the product because they are able to identify individuals who have admitted to stealing, but whose incidents may not show up in a typical criminal search.

Companies offering pension, health and welfare plans to employees must file what's called a form 5500 with the U.S. Labor Department. The forms report the assets, trustees, administrative costs and investments of the plans, and are intended to help spot financial problems or fraud. You can find search for them free online at freeERISA.com.

Textalyser will take any text you submit or a Web page and analyze it for complexity and readability. The CJ's home page scored a 6.1 for readability, meaning it was "easy."

"Forum Zilla helps web users find online forums for virtually any topic! "

Baseball Almanac boasts it "has MORE than 34,000 pages of baseball history, MORE than 80,000 fast facts, original research from recognized experts AND material not found or seen on any other web site in the world." I'm sure we can all agree it's a good thing we have this repository of information to recall the once-proud past of this dying sport...

The Kentucky Attorney General has an online database of charities and professional solicitors registered with the state.

The Stanford Law School Securities Class Action Clearinghouse lets you search by company for court cases involving stock fraud and similar corporate swindles.

The Virtual Gumshoe is a one-stop shop for finding investigative resources on the Web.

Handy advice from WordTips on speeding up deleting text in Microsoft Word: "All you need to do is hold down the Ctrl key to speed up your deletions. Using Ctrl+Delete deletes text from the insertion point to the end of the next word. For instance, if you wanted to delete four words to the right, simply press Ctrl+Delete four times. Likewise, Ctrl+Backspace deletes words to the left of the insertion point."

The Auto Exchange offers a list of all U.S. state departments of motor vehicles.

Allwhois is for finding out who registered a particular Web site. It claims to be the most complete service of its kind on the Web.

PoliticalMoneyLine is one of the best campaign finance sites on the Web, allowing political donor searches by name, zip code, PAC, employer, occupation and more.

IRE's Campaign Finance Information Center has a clickable map to help you find out what campaign finance data is available in any state.

The Chronic Disease Prevention (CDP) databases "were developed to provide access to information on chronic disease prevention and health promotion to health professionals responsible for supporting, planning, developing, implementing, and evaluating chronic disease prevention and risk reduction efforts." It provides article abstracts and bibliographic citations and full text from "selected publications."

The Educator's Reference Desk offers education information that will no longer by offered by the U.S. Department of Education through its discontinued AskERIC service.

Here is a large collection of information on homelessness and poverty.

You can search for people and organizations banned from federal Health and Human Services programs because of fraud and abuse. You can also download the entire database, which was recently updated.

Al Tompkins, of the Poynter Institute's "Al's Morning Meeting" newsletter, has compiled a large collection of links for covering the 2004 elections.

Here's an interesting use of mapping to show where the U.S. presidential candidates are getting their money.

If you haven't heard of RSS yet, you soon will. Here's an article explaining what it is and why you should care. RSS (which stands for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication, depending on who you ask) is one of the ways I gather all these links I report on the CAR Report.

Wordtips will email you tips on using Microsoft Word every week. Exceltips does the same for Excel.

The National Criminal Justice Reference Service will email a bi-weekly summary of new information it produces on crime, police, corrections, substance abuse and the law.

ConvertIt.com offers all kinds of free calculators to convert weights, distance, time, currencies and much more. For example, this page will tell you how many days or weeks it is between two dates.

Librarian Gary Price laments the over reliance on Google at the expense of trained librarians and libraries. "Why do more and more people believe that universal truth is just a click away via a single source?" he asks.