Unregistered Carriers on 11/06/2009 - 1762
Unregistered Carriers on 11/09/2009 - 1778
Today, I would like to put on my UCR Systems Committee Chairperson hat and point out what I perceive to be a weakness in the overall UCR registration / data exchange system. Please notice that I didn't say a "problem", but rather a "weakness".
Specifically, we have no viable way to reconcile the registration data that are (is?) flowing through our system. It's the kind of thing an auditor would look at and say, "How do you know for sure ...". In this case, the question would be, "How do you know for sure that the data is moving through the system and arriving where it's supposed to arrive accurately?" We're not saying that we KNOW there's a problem. We're just asking how we know that we DON'T have a problem? And the answer is, we don't know that.
Perhaps a financial analogy would be helpful. Any of us who manage sections where money is processed knows that at the end of a processing session, one needs to add up the transactions done, compare the payment instruments processed against the transactions processed and make sure the totals and the details of each match.
We don't have the same kind of reconciliation process with UCR data.
Data gets input and "shipped off", but we don't have any kind of "reconciliation report" to show us that the data traveled and landed appropriately. Admittedly, the data travels a somewhat complicated path. Ten States update both the Feds and Iteris ... on different schedules. The Feds (and Volpe) have their own internal schedule that involves not only MCMIS, but L&I, Safestat, SAFER, UCR and who knows what other systems. Eventually, the data stops traveling ... and hopefully lands where it's supposed to land.
When all is said and done, however, nowhere in the process can we say, "OK, I've got 'X' here and 'X' here. It balances! We're good!" And that strikes me as a weakness.
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