"Extract Systems responded to our need for a fast, smooth installation to bring Santa Barbara County into compliance with AB 1168 redaction legislation. Implementing the FLEX Index software resulted in a 66% capture rate and a projected average savings of 450 hours per year in staff time. After one week of reviewing ID Shield results, the software was able to identify 100% of the SSNs in a queue for validation whereas our manual review process was resulting in a 94.5% accuracy rate."
California Secretary of State Sets the Redaction Bar High – ID Shield Surpasses RFQ Requirements
Challenge
In August 2007, the California Secretary of State issued an RFQ that called on vendors to redact Social Security numbers in 4.7 million documents in UCC back filings. The requirements were challenging:
- Redact 4.7 million documents within eight weeks
- Accuracy rate for finding and redacting Social Security numbers must meet or exceed 98%
- The incidence of false positives (redacting information that is not a Social Security number) must not exceed 1%
Creating even more urgency, California passed Assembly Bill 1168 which required the Secretary of State to protect residents from identity theft by redacting the first five digits of SSNs by January 2008. The Secretary’s office decided to put a high premium on citizens’ private data by determining they would redact all nine digits of the SSN.
Solution
In December 2007, Kindred Partners was awarded the project and brought Extract Systems on board for their redaction software, ID Shield.
Kindred created an accelerated implementation plan utilizing existing and temporary employees for the verification process. Extract Systems provided rigorous ID Shield Automated Redaction Software training for verification employees to ensure that accuracy rates and the timeline would be met. As ID Shield redacted documents, the processed images were split into different queues based on the number of redactions and the number of pages in each image. Based on the complexity of the document, each queue was routed to the computer of a particular verifier, specifically trained to work with documents of that type.
The redaction accuracy of ID Shield and Kindred’s innovative implementation plan yielded results that exceeded the RFQ:
- 4.7 million documents redacted within four weeks
- 99.78 % accuracy rate for redacting Social Security Numbers in a valid sample of documents
- 99.1 % of documents yielded no false positives
Outcome
The California Secretary of State’s office set the bar high yet ID Shield’s accuracy rate surpassed the RFQ requirements for redacting the UCC backfilings. In June 2008, Extract Systems’ ID Shield began redacting Colorado’s 850,000 image pages of day-forward UCC filings in a fully automated format.